Comment on The New Yorker Asks: Is the A.I. Boom Turning Into an A.I. Bubble?
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoOk; what application (which benefits society) requires data center level compute beyond physics simulations (which are better suited for quantum computers).
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
An entire state government could run on your phone but requires an entire data center because it’s written in JavaScript that emulates the original COBOL code that ran the government in the 1960’s.
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
No. A state government needs to support 1/10th of its population actively using its services. Say that state has 10M people; you will want 10k cores for all state services. an 8P server has about 1536 cores and you will need about 7 of them. So it still takes a whole rack even with the COBOL programs and applications written in C and Assembly.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“State services” is database lookups and billing. Back in the 90’s, I supported 10k users (1.5k active at any moment) on a Pentium 3 with 512MB of Ram.
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Constraint solvers for things such as Medicaid eligibility; OCR tagging for scanned documents; Anti-AI detection for uploaded images; but yes most state services are data entry and batch processing with web front ends.
Also the number of supported users does not scale linearly with the number of CPU cores as Amdahl’s law showed back in 1967.