For example, I have an "AI" project on Frontier. The process was remarkably simple and easy - a couple of Google Meets, a two page screed on what we're doing, a couple of forms, key fob showed up. Entire process took about a month and a good chunk of that was them waiting on me.
Probably half a days work total for 20k node hours (four MI250x per node) on Frontier for free, which is an incredible amount of compute my early resource constrained startup would have never been able to even fathom on some cloud, etc. It was like pulling teeth to even get a single H100 x8 on GCP for what would cost at least $250k for what we're doing. And that's with "knowing people" there...
These press releases talking about AI are intended to encourage these kinds of applications and partnerships. It's remarkable to me how many orgs, startups, etc don't realize these systems exist (or even consider them) and go out and spend money or burn "credits" that could be applied to more suitable things that make more sense.
They're saying "Hey, just so you know these things can do AI too. Come talk to us."
As an added bonus you get to say you're working with a national lab on the #1 TOP500 supercomputer in the world. That has remarkable marketing, PR, and clout value well beyond "yeah we spent X$ on $BIGCLOUD just like everyone else".
For example, I have an "AI" project on Frontier. The process was remarkably simple and easy - a couple of Google Meets, a two page screed on what we're doing, a couple of forms, key fob showed up. Entire process took about a month and a good chunk of that was them waiting on me.
Probably half a days work total for 20k node hours (four MI250x per node) on Frontier for free, which is an incredible amount of compute my early resource constrained startup would have never been able to even fathom on some cloud, etc. It was like pulling teeth to even get a single H100 x8 on GCP for what would cost at least $250k for what we're doing. And that's with "knowing people" there...
These press releases talking about AI are intended to encourage these kinds of applications and partnerships. It's remarkable to me how many orgs, startups, etc don't realize these systems exist (or even consider them) and go out and spend money or burn "credits" that could be applied to more suitable things that make more sense.
They're saying "Hey, just so you know these things can do AI too. Come talk to us."
As an added bonus you get to say you're working with a national lab on the #1 TOP500 supercomputer in the world. That has remarkable marketing, PR, and clout value well beyond "yeah we spent X$ on $BIGCLOUD just like everyone else".