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Government agency will use Google Cloud H4D VMs to replace HPE Cray machines:
Uncle Sam will no longer be hosting his own supercomputers to predict the weather. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has picked Google Cloud to provide the infrastructure for its weather forecasting operations.
In an announcement, NOAA boasted that it will be the first national weather prediction center to run on the commercial cloud, though the UK's Met Office is also in the process of moving its own weather prediction system to Microsoft Azure in a hybrid setup. Weather operations are typically run on in-house or government-funded supercomputer systems, which helps drive the HPC (high performance computing) market.
[...] The plan is to move NOAA's Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System, run by the National Weather Service (NWS) division, over to the cloud by December 2027, along with the software that generates NWS weather data for analysis.
The agency is hoping that the cloud will make model forecasting more nimble, resulting in earlier predictions and better warnings for all the extreme weather events that seem to keep occurring these days. It was the in-house systems that were holding things back, evidently.
"Cloud-based high-performance computing will accelerate the transition of research into operations by eliminating traditional bottlenecks of on-premise systems," said NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs in a statement.
Jacobs noted that the cloud's flexibility for providing large amounts of compute is advantageous: the agency can ramp up cycles during tropical storm season, then wind them down during calmer periods.
[...] For the job, Google plans to use Google Cloud H4D VMs, built on AMD Epyc processors. Google labels these instances as "virtual machines" because they run under a hypervisor that integrates Google's networking and orchestration tools. As a result, they can be synchronized to run large jobs the same way supercomputers do.
According to Google, customers can access H4Ds for as low as 3 cents per core-hour without long-term commitments. For supercomputing jobs, they can also use Cluster Toolkit to deploy clusters and Cluster Director to maintain them. Google Cloud's Batch can handle the queuing, scheduling, and resource provisioning.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05, @12:08PM (6 children)
That presupposes they actually think, decision makers these days are depressingly so 'look a squirrel'
Precisely the squirrel that's currently the focus of their broken little minds, 'we must have cloud as that's where AI lives, AI will save us, all hail AI...' or something akin to that runs through their heads like wee motorcars.
Ah, but what happens to the infrastructure paid for by the schmucks when the bubble is deliberately burst?
Oh there is, unfortunately there are currently pesky humans competing for it
Cf. the last response
Wheels within wheels, it might not make sense to us, but then we're not privy to their plans.
Based on a number of seemingly insane 'to the cloud and AI' decisions, I'd make a guess that they're trying to consolidate into the 'cloud' and put under increasing AI control a number of human managed services that they deem are critical to their future plans.
These services, factories, utilities etc are currently running on hardware they don't own, control or want to allocate any future human manpower to maintain, so they're persuading, by the art of expedient bullshittery, the current owners and operators of said services to move them and their control of them into the cloud and hand them over to their ever so obedient 'djinn' AIs to run them.
Oh, I've worked in departments where decisions (rash or otherwise) were made down the pub, everything else (studies, reports etc) were mere window dressing. I've even sat on a technical committee where our sole function was to exist as a sop, a rubber stamp, to give the impression that the sometimes insane unilateral decisions of our lords and masters were taken on technical merit, and to provide them with a convenient whipping boy when they invariably went tits up.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 05, @03:32PM (4 children)
>There's also not enough land (real estate) on which to build it.
Such a well informed observation deserves a little thought:
Not enough land? What stops a datacenter from being built vertically? They need cooling, being up in the air is all the better. They choose not to do it because it is a little more expensive and a little slower to build. Right now, some datacenters are being situated on bare earth under tents - this only works in very specific locations, but they are doing it there because: it's fast and cheap to build (and the hardware is likely obsolete in a few months anyway...)
Have you even a glimmer of a concept of places like Iceland? Not enough land, you say? Maybe they'd need to drop some more fiber connectivity from Iceland to the rest of the world, but there's geothermal energy, there's plenty of cooling (water and elsewise), and there's plenty of material to build concrete towers from. Australia may be a little more challenging from a cooling standpoint, but solar energy is pretty abundant there, and I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this "not enough land" statement when looking around outside of Alice Springs... Even the U.S. southwest would seem to have quite enough land for every datacenter on the planet, if only the companies doing the building would go to the trouble to locate there, instead of some cheap land near people where they can get cheap water for cooling.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday August 05, @04:01PM (3 children)
Not enough land? What stops a datacenter from being built vertically?
In a word: cost. They are built as absolutely shoddily as they can legally get away with. Walls and ceilings are sheet metal with minimal insulation, if even that. The floors are poured concrete. You're basically dealing with a multi-acre pole barn. Doing anything vertically would not just increase the cost, but increase the costs by orders of magnitude. Keep in mind that building the centers is an end in itself, really it is the only goal. As such, shoddy materials help 100% — both by maximizing the profit margin and by allowing them to be built with such speed that local communities and governments do not have time to even react let alone work up a means to block the construction.
The good news, I hear, is that most of the material can be recycled when they are torn back down. The only loss is the permanent destruction of the topsoil which was destroyed to make place for the buildings.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 05, @04:30PM (1 child)
> increase the costs by orders of magnitude.
Also increase the potential future utility of the structure for something other than a datacenter... vertical farms come to mind, particularly if there's abundant water available for evaporative uses.
> The only loss is the permanent destruction of the topsoil which was destroyed to make place for the buildings.
Typically they'll scrape the organics layers off when pouring a slab, but the slab itself isn't really permanent. Even the thickest concrete can be removed if you are determined enough. https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/in-pictures-demolition-of-stade-reactor-building-progresses [world-nuclear-news.org]
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday August 05, @06:45PM
Also increase the potential future utility of the structure for something other than a datacenter...
That's unfortunately not part of their profit equation. The scams (and they're all scams) made around data center construction have the construction itself as an end goal. Anything after that, from their perspective, is irrelevant. Thus the costs are minimized. They'd use cardboard if they could get away with it. Electricity supplies are addressed with a bit of mumbling and hand waving as they're externalities, from the perspective of the construction investor.
The company hiring the construction company and, to a much lesser extent, the construction company itself make a profit. Everyone else generally left holding the bag. If the community 'leaders' were crooked and/or naive enough to offer tax breaks, then they even end up losing a lot of money in the process.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 06, @05:32AM
There's a good point. No matter how badly the AI/datacenter craze goes tits-up, contractors still made a shitload of dough building the damn things.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Wednesday August 05, @03:51PM
This post could be boiled down to saying "ask the party currently controlling all three branches of government"