Thank you for that comment, as someone who has had exposure to the DOE as well (and LBL at that) I can only echo your sentiment. I'd even go further and state that is hard for me to believe that any innovation can happen in the calcified structures of governmental labs. Maybe the classified ones are different.
The "DOE made NVIDIA" myth is a story I haven't seen pushed outside the DOE complex. It is true that the supercomputers the DOE pushes could be considered industry subsidies, by providing industry companies with a steady customer with a very high tolerance for unfinished products. That applies to NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, HPE/Cray and IBM more or less equally.
I also want to stress what often gets overlooked: supercomputers are hell to operate and use. Aurora runs on Slingshot, a Cray interconnect. Those things look good on paper. Examples: Cray Aries (and "network quiesces") or Cray DataWarp. Who knows how Slingshot actually works in practice, for a hero run it only needs to hold things together for a few hours. As long as you get a high TOP500 ranking, a supercomputer is a success.
There is no market for those things anymore and they are beholden to the same economics as everything else, hence codes that can't afford an army of PostDocs to work around the bugs and design decisions that are only necessary due to scale of those systems are better suited to plain old mid-range clusters. And I haven't even mentioned the eccentric userland of supercomputers.
There are many reasons the DOE affords to run those behemoths. Some more trivial and petty than most people would like to believe. Like the author of the parent post, I have come to believe that the best bang for the buck on scientific output can be found elsewhere.
The "DOE made NVIDIA" myth is a story I haven't seen pushed outside the DOE complex. It is true that the supercomputers the DOE pushes could be considered industry subsidies, by providing industry companies with a steady customer with a very high tolerance for unfinished products. That applies to NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, HPE/Cray and IBM more or less equally.
I also want to stress what often gets overlooked: supercomputers are hell to operate and use. Aurora runs on Slingshot, a Cray interconnect. Those things look good on paper. Examples: Cray Aries (and "network quiesces") or Cray DataWarp. Who knows how Slingshot actually works in practice, for a hero run it only needs to hold things together for a few hours. As long as you get a high TOP500 ranking, a supercomputer is a success.
There is no market for those things anymore and they are beholden to the same economics as everything else, hence codes that can't afford an army of PostDocs to work around the bugs and design decisions that are only necessary due to scale of those systems are better suited to plain old mid-range clusters. And I haven't even mentioned the eccentric userland of supercomputers.
There are many reasons the DOE affords to run those behemoths. Some more trivial and petty than most people would like to believe. Like the author of the parent post, I have come to believe that the best bang for the buck on scientific output can be found elsewhere.