Andromeda Cluster: 10 Exaflops* for Startups from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross (opens in new tab)

(andromedacluster.com)

165 pointsmobileexpert2y ago40 comments

40 comments

Forget LinPack and friends. Jack Dongarra is going to need to switch to the new metric for supercomputers—-kilograms of H100 GPUs—- about 3,300 give or take a few grams for this system.

Dylan168072y ago

That would be mostly heatsinks, right? If you switch to liquid cooling does your score change?

nordsieck2y ago

> That would be mostly heatsinks, right? If you switch to liquid cooling does your score change?

You still need a radiator with liquid cooling. It just makes the setup more fragile. And lets you use a bigger cooler/fan.

1 more reply

paxys2y ago

> For use by startup investments of Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross

> Reach out if you want access

I'm confused by the last two bullet points. Is this website only meant to be used by these "startup investments" or can anyone fill out the linked form?

jrott2y ago

Probably deal flow. Seems like a good way to find AI startups.

unkulunkulu2y ago

anyone can fill out the form and agree to be invested in by those guys?

dekhn2y ago

Can the creators explain in more detail: how is this different from (for example) the OpenAI cluster that MSFT built in Azure? Is it hosted in an existing cloud provider, or in a data center? Which data center? Who admins the system, is there an SRE team in case it goes down during training? And can you attempt ot run the same benchmarks that Top500 uses to determine what your double precision flops are and give that number in addition to your "10 exaflops" (which I believe is single precision).

jsnell2y ago

Pretty sure it's FP8, not singles. (Which for the H100 makes a 60x difference.)

dekhn2y ago

as an ex-supercomputer nerd (where the fastest system in teh world finally reached over 1 exaflops of double precision), it seems awfully weird to call FP8 "flops". There's nothing truly wrong with it (since "flops" is a fairly poorly defined term), but it makes it clear that ML supercomputers are very different beasts from classic supercomputers. And also makes me wonder if/when the classic folks will try to make more codes work correctly with smaller precision (for example, in molecular dynamics).

mobileexpertOP2y ago

Emad from Stability estimates this at 4M/month. https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1668666509298745344

arbuge2y ago

Or an upfront payment of ~$25m at 10k per H100.

natfriedman2y ago

H100s cost $35-40k each

3 more replies

bigdict2y ago

lmao are they trolling with the naming

https://www.cerebras.net/andromeda/

mulmen2y ago

I don’t get it. Why would this be a troll?

bigdict2y ago

An NVIDIA competitor creates a deep learning cluster, calls it Andromeda.

Later, these guys create an NVIDIA-based deep learning cluster and call it… Andromeda.

1 more reply

MR4D2y ago

The mainframe is dead. Long love the new mainframe. We just call it DGX because it’s cool.

Even the leasing model has made a comeback!

ryanwaggoner2y ago

Same guys behind https://aigrant.org, maybe it's mainly as a way to get dealflow?

natfriedman2y ago

And to support startups we invest in who need GPUs!

shon2y ago

@nat would you be interested in presenting about this at The AI Conference in SF?

Your take on hardware-enabled investment would be interesting.

We also have folks like Hugging Face’s GPT Research Lead, Langchain and LlamaIndex founders, Cerebras’s CEO and many more speaking. It’s A builder-heavy audience.

https://aiconference.com

* this is my event

ignoramous2y ago

AI Grant, back in 2018, offered £2500 and got all sorts of skeptical folks doubting Nat's and Daniel's motives (they will steal IP! there's some gotcha here!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16760736

They offer 100x that at £250000 per team now, plus this humongous GPU cluster. Way to start small and work your way to this. Amazing execution.

minimaxir2y ago

April 2018 was a more nascient time for AI: BERT wasn't open sourced until November 2018 and GPT-2 wasn't open sourced until February 2019, both of which kicked off the AI boom.

1 more reply

Ameo2y ago

Would be very cool to see some pictures of the cluster; sounds like an impressive build!

mobileexpertOP2y ago

I’m assuming this is visually just some racks in (probably) Azure data centers and is leased not owned.

zora_goron2y ago

This line makes me think this might be a physically-owned system:

>> Total mass of 3,291 kg (GPUs only; not counting chassis, system, rack)

dauertewigkeit2y ago

That is also what I suspect. Otherwise where would they get two thousand H100s?

1 more reply

braindead_in2y ago

Someone please start the GPT 5 training before the regulation kicks in.

0052y ago

Looks like they've reserved a bunch of compute from Lambda Labs?

Edit: Based off this tweet, looks very similar https://twitter.com/LambdaAPI/status/1668676838044868620

swyx2y ago

i mean if its just h100 specs then it cant help but look similar cant it

0052y ago

Not just the H100 specs, the interconnect and ingress/egress details.

1 more reply

brucethemoose22y ago

> Big enough to train llama 65B in ~10 days

Y'all could totally eat Meta's lunch and train an open LLM with all the innovations that have come since LLaMA's release. Other startups are trying, but they all seem bottlenecked by training time/resources.

This could be where the next Stable Diffusion 1.5 comes from.

redsh2y ago

The new lean startup. 3,291 kg

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

40 comments

robwwilliams2y ago

Forget LinPack and friends. Jack Dongarra is going to need to switch to the new metric for supercomputers—-kilograms of H100 GPUs—- about 3,300 give or take a few grams for this system.

Dylan168072y ago

That would be mostly heatsinks, right? If you switch to liquid cooling does your score change?

nordsieck2y ago

> That would be mostly heatsinks, right? If you switch to liquid cooling does your score change?

You still need a radiator with liquid cooling. It just makes the setup more fragile. And lets you use a bigger cooler/fan.

1 more reply

paxys2y ago

> For use by startup investments of Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross

> Reach out if you want access

I'm confused by the last two bullet points. Is this website only meant to be used by these "startup investments" or can anyone fill out the linked form?

jrott2y ago

Probably deal flow. Seems like a good way to find AI startups.

unkulunkulu2y ago

anyone can fill out the form and agree to be invested in by those guys?

dekhn2y ago

jsnell2y ago

Pretty sure it's FP8, not singles. (Which for the H100 makes a 60x difference.)

dekhn2y ago

mobileexpertOP2y ago

Emad from Stability estimates this at 4M/month. https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1668666509298745344

arbuge2y ago

Or an upfront payment of ~$25m at 10k per H100.

natfriedman2y ago

H100s cost $35-40k each

3 more replies

bigdict2y ago

lmao are they trolling with the naming

https://www.cerebras.net/andromeda/

mulmen2y ago

I don’t get it. Why would this be a troll?

bigdict2y ago

An NVIDIA competitor creates a deep learning cluster, calls it Andromeda.

Later, these guys create an NVIDIA-based deep learning cluster and call it… Andromeda.

1 more reply

MR4D2y ago

The mainframe is dead. Long love the new mainframe. We just call it DGX because it’s cool.

Even the leasing model has made a comeback!

ryanwaggoner2y ago

Same guys behind https://aigrant.org, maybe it's mainly as a way to get dealflow?

natfriedman2y ago

And to support startups we invest in who need GPUs!

shon2y ago

@nat would you be interested in presenting about this at The AI Conference in SF?

Your take on hardware-enabled investment would be interesting.

We also have folks like Hugging Face’s GPT Research Lead, Langchain and LlamaIndex founders, Cerebras’s CEO and many more speaking. It’s A builder-heavy audience.

https://aiconference.com

* this is my event

ignoramous2y ago

They offer 100x that at £250000 per team now, plus this humongous GPU cluster. Way to start small and work your way to this. Amazing execution.

minimaxir2y ago

April 2018 was a more nascient time for AI: BERT wasn't open sourced until November 2018 and GPT-2 wasn't open sourced until February 2019, both of which kicked off the AI boom.

1 more reply

Ameo2y ago

Would be very cool to see some pictures of the cluster; sounds like an impressive build!

mobileexpertOP2y ago

I’m assuming this is visually just some racks in (probably) Azure data centers and is leased not owned.

zora_goron2y ago

This line makes me think this might be a physically-owned system:

>> Total mass of 3,291 kg (GPUs only; not counting chassis, system, rack)

dauertewigkeit2y ago

That is also what I suspect. Otherwise where would they get two thousand H100s?

1 more reply

braindead_in2y ago