1 Second vs. 182 Days: France’s New Supercomputer Delivers Mind-Blowing Speeds That Leave All of Humanity in the Dust
1 Second vs. 182 Days: France’s New Supercomputer Delivers Mind-Blowing Speeds That Leave All of Humanity in the Dust
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> The Jean Zay supercomputer, launched as a successor to the “Turing,” has undergone multiple upgrades, culminating in its most significant enhancement, Jean Zay 4. This upgrade has increased its processing power fourfold, reaching an impressive 125.9 petaflops, equivalent to 125.9 million billion calculations per second. To put this in perspective, if every human counted one operation per second, it would take 182 days to match what Jean Zay achieves in just one second.
> A significant focus of Jean Zay’s capabilities is its support for advanced AI developments. The supercomputer plays a crucial role in training, specializing, and running inference for AI foundation models, which are essential for developing sophisticated AI applications.
> Moreover, Jean Zay is noted for its energy efficiency, utilizing Nvidia GPUs and a next-generation warm-water cooling system developed by Eviden. This innovative cooling system not only enhances the supercomputer’s efficiency but also recovers residual heat, which is **used to heat approximately 1,500 households on the Plateau de Saclay.**
That’s a really terrible comparison given it isn’t at all how brains function. Sounds cool though.
This is meaningless. How much faster is it than the previous supercomputer? That would be a sensible, meaningful information. “All of humanity doing 1 calculation per second” and “leaves humanity in the dust” are not meaningful expressions of a supercomputer’s speed.
Stupid headline, but I like the waste heat reclaimation.
I wonder how many homes could be heated if every supercomputer and datacentre used this.
What sort of garbage title is this, making it sound like it’s the fastest computer but in reality it isn’t even in the top 10
To put this into perspective the colossus cluster that xAI has deployed has roughly ~197,000 petaflops
This is not only not special. It’s pathetic in scale to what every other AI organization has. It has a whopping 1,576x less computer than colossus.
Some good efficiency gains in terms of the cooling, and it’s good that France can produce something like this rather than just the usual players. Less really pioneering in terms of performance, more an assessment of how good ‘ordinary’ supercomputer systems are getting.
Jean Zay… sound suspiciously… Chineeeese!!! Jang Tse. I knew it 🤣😂
Well I guess it would have been the 10th fastest computer by the top500 June 2024 list, would have been out of the top 10 in November though, fast computer but not anywhere like the article is clickbating
> processing power of 125.9 petaflops
So not in the top 10 (or top 15, even?) or even the fastest computer in Europe