Defense Think Tank MITRE To Build AI Supercomputer With Nvidia (washingtonpost.com) 43
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: A key supplier to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies is building a $20 million supercomputer with buzzy chipmaker Nvidia to speed deployment of artificial intelligence capabilities across the U.S. federal government, the MITRE think tank said Tuesday. MITRE, a federally funded, not-for-profit research organization that has supplied U.S. soldiers and spies with exotic technical products since the 1950s, says the project could improve everything from Medicare to taxes. "There's huge opportunities for AI to make government more efficient," said Charles Clancy, senior vice president of MITRE. "Government is inefficient, it's bureaucratic, it takes forever to get stuff done. ... That's the grand vision, is how do we do everything from making Medicare sustainable to filing your taxes easier?" [...] The MITRE supercomputer will be based in Ashburn, Va., and should be up and running late this year. [...]
Clancy said the planned supercomputer will run 256 Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, at a cost of $20 million. This counts as a small supercomputer: The world's fastest supercomputer, Frontier in Tennessee, boasts 37,888 GPUs, and Meta is seeking to build one with 350,000 GPUs. But MITRE's computer will still eclipse Stanford's Natural Language Processing Group's 68 GPUs, and will be large enough to train large language models to perform AI tasks tailored for government agencies. Clancy said all federal agencies funding MITRE will be able to use this AI "sandbox." "AI is the tool that is solving a wide range of problems," Clancy said. "The U.S. military needs to figure out how to do command and control. We need to understand how cryptocurrency markets impact the traditional banking sector. ... Those are the sorts of problems we want to solve."
Clancy said the planned supercomputer will run 256 Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, at a cost of $20 million. This counts as a small supercomputer: The world's fastest supercomputer, Frontier in Tennessee, boasts 37,888 GPUs, and Meta is seeking to build one with 350,000 GPUs. But MITRE's computer will still eclipse Stanford's Natural Language Processing Group's 68 GPUs, and will be large enough to train large language models to perform AI tasks tailored for government agencies. Clancy said all federal agencies funding MITRE will be able to use this AI "sandbox." "AI is the tool that is solving a wide range of problems," Clancy said. "The U.S. military needs to figure out how to do command and control. We need to understand how cryptocurrency markets impact the traditional banking sector. ... Those are the sorts of problems we want to solve."
The Great AI race is on (Score:1)
Think Tank and AI (Score:3, Funny)
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Which is which?
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it called "Defense" when most US military actions are outside its border? Shouldn't it be "Offense"?
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Depends on if the country has oil.
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Best to keep wars on someone else's soil.
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Best to keep wars on someone else's soil.
Best to stay out of wars.
Why should we care what happens in the Mideast?
It mattered back when we got our oil from there (although the wars didn't seem to help), but we are now self-sufficient in oil and gas.
America's military has a reverse Midas curse: Everything they touch turns to dust.
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We don't always have a choice in the matter.
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We don't always have a choice in the matter.
Pearl Harbor was 83 years ago.
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According to Congress Israel is the 51st State.
Those Jim Crow laws, tho.
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According to Congress Israel is the 51st State.
I thought AIPAC owned the US Congress, making the US an Israeli subsidiary.
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Why should we care what happens in the Mideast?
Why should we care about forest fires that are located outside our city limits?
It's a small world these days; what happens in the Mideast doesn't always stay in the Mideast.
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"The best defense is a good offense."
You know who said that? Mel, the cook on Alice!
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boot to the head
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It was the War Department until shortly before you were born.
Somebody read Orwell's treatise on DoubleSpeak and renamed it.
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Defending All Interests. (Score:3)
Why is it called "Defense" when most US military actions are outside its border? Shouldn't it be "Offense"?
Something along the lines of defending all interests, both current and future.
I’m paraphrasing of course. You’d have to refer to The Insider Trading Guide to Becoming a Billionaire on a Politicians Salary for more detail.
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offense is the best defense.
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Yes, the USA intends to do it's best to ensure that all future wars are NOT fought on US soil. I am pretty sure that most countries would prefer that any war they are involved in is not fought on their soil as well.
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Why is it called "Defense" when most US military actions are outside its border? Shouldn't it be "Offense"?
Newspeak. The "Department of Defense" used to be the "War Department." But "defense" is so much cheerier, don't you think? Same goes here.
Test pls ignore (Score:2)
From ye olde 5 digit user id the good old days, been a long time. So many kids playing around with 7 digits user id wow.
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They're up to 8 digits, the 7 digit users are the old-timers. o_O
Now as for this supercomputer, imagine a Beowulf cluster of them...
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Is that the polite way of saying I'm the ancient/obsolete/blast from the past user :-)
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Is that the polite way of saying I'm the ancient/obsolete/blast from the past user :-)
You are a CLASSIC ... like Windows 3.1 and the B&W Lisa computer.
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Well actually a little further back, my early toys as lab rats was Pyramid OS, Vax VMS followed by Digital Ultrix, SGI Irix & early DEC alpha
Digital has unique "two legged mouse twin track" (kind of IBM dual Trackpoint facing down").
We had slow 300 baud modem, normal 1200 baud, fast 2400bps, then luxurious 9600bps US robotics.
Yeah those were the days.
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Almost that far back for me. VMS embedded in a commerical voicemail system (CINDI). Lots of proprietary embedded OS at work - phone systems. Lot's of DOS & Commodore stuff at the start for me at home.
300 baud modems? Yup, but lots of 1200 baud stuff at home & work. Had a 2400 baud PPI modem at work that was nice to use.
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With all of those GPUs I wonder if It will be able to play Crisis?
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My last and only console was Atari 2600 after that Breakout, Missile Command, Pacman, Digger, Hero's Quest, Wing Commander...
During lunch break I play Street fighther, then SF2.
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From ye olde 5 digit user id the good old days, been a long time. So many kids playing around with 7 digits user id wow.
Ain't that the truth!
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I wonder how many the last of us still left in this mundane world vs those who had joined Jon Postel.
Geek never dies, we just turn to zombies
Source BSD games = fortune(6)
https://linux.die.net/man/6/fortune
Small change (Score:2)
$20 million is not a lot. Number ought to be in the billion dollars range. Though I suspect the future is going to be distributed AI .. Tesla, and probably Microsoft and Apple too will include an "opt-out" feature by which you allow them to use compute on your computer (and presumably .. I assume .. they'll pay you a few pennies for electricity). Elon Musk stated in Tesla's most recent earning call that Tesla will be doing that with cars you buy/lease, so why won't Apple do that with your computers/phones?
How repay bribes (Score:2)
Step 2: Law makers tell a "think tank" to buy $20 million in product from the nice company that just bought you a $200 meal aboard a yacht that nice sunny weekend
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You can thank Ronald Reagan for a lot of this. He rode into Washington declaring Fed. Gov. was the problem, and that it should let private industry do the work. The R's decided that sounded just potty for their campaign contributors. And the feeding trough was greatly expanded to much fanfare by the newly created R campaign contributors.
"Think tank" (Score:3)
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Al FTW
What an unpredictable news (Score:2)
They are going to build an AI supercomputer out of NVIDIA chips? No way!
I thought the standard in the industry was to build them out of potato chips!
This NVIDIA is so unknown, I wonder why no one has done that before! What a great think tank!
$20m = one chip and one month electricity (Score:1)
What does $20m actually get you in the AI "supercomputer" race.. an outdated computer when it's finally up and running and a very large electric bill
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Pure Pork (Score:2)
MITRE produces whitepapers (Score:2)
IS solving problems? (Score:2)
"AI is the tool that is solving a wide range of problems," Clancy said.
is it? What problems is it actually solving yet?