[HN Gopher] Sandia turns on brain-like storage-free supercomputer
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Sandia turns on brain-like storage-free supercomputer
Author : rbanffy
Score : 207 points
Date : 2025-06-06 15:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blocksandfiles.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blocksandfiles.com)
| realo wrote:
| No storage? Wow!
|
| Oh... 138240 Terabytes of RAM.
|
| Ok.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Just don't turn it off I guess...
| rzzzt wrote:
| I hear Georges Leclanche is getting close to a sort of
| electro-chemical discovery for this conundrum.
| rbanffy wrote:
| At least not while it's computing something. It should be
| fine to turn it off after whatever results have been
| transferred to other computer.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I feel like there is a straightforward biological analogue
| for this.
|
| But at in this case, one wouldn't subject to macro-scale
| nonlinear effects arising from the uncertainty principle when
| trying to "restore" the system.
| crtasm wrote:
| >In Sandia's case, it has taken delivery of a 24 board, 175,000
| core system
|
| So a paltry 2,304 GB RAM
| SbEpUBz2 wrote:
| I am reading it wrong, or the math doesn't add up? Shouldn't it
| be 138240 GB not 138240 TB?
| divbzero wrote:
| You're right, OP got the math wrong. It should be:
| 1,440 boards x 96 GB/board = 138,240 GB
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Either way, that doesn't exactly sound like a "storage-
| free" solution to me.
| louthy wrote:
| Just whatever you do, don't turn it off!
| Nevermark wrote:
| "What does this button do?" Bmmmfff.
|
| On the TRS-80 Model III, the reset button was a bright
| red recessed square to the right of the attached
| keyboard.
|
| It was irresistible to anyone who had no idea what you
| were doing as you worked, lost in the flow, insensitive
| to the presence of another human being, until...
|
| --
|
| Then there was the Kaypro. Many of their systems had a
| bug, software or hardware, that would occasionally cause
| an unplanned reset the first time, after you turned it
| on, that you tried writing to the disk. Exactly the wrong
| moment.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Oh, the Apple ][ reset button beat the TRS-80 Model III
| "hands down" many years earlier, with its "Big Beautiful
| Reset Button" on the upper right corner of the keyboard.
|
| It was comically vulnerable -- just begging to be
| pressed. The early models had one so soft and easy to
| trigger that your cat could reboot your Apple ][ with a
| single curious paw. Later revisions stiffened the spring
| a bit, but it was still a menace.
|
| There was a whole cottage industry aftermarket of
| defensive accessories: plastic shields that slid over the
| reset key, mail-order kits to reroute it through an
| auxiliary switch, or firmware mods to require CTRL-RESET.
| You'd find those in the classified ads in Nibble or Apple
| Orchard magazines, nestled between ASCII art of wizards
| and promises to triple your RAM.
|
| Because nothing says "I live dangerously" like writing
| your 6502 assembly in memory with the mini assembler
| without saving, then letting your little brother near the
| keyboard.
|
| I got sweet sweet revenge by writing a "Flakey Keyboard
| Simulator" in assembly that hooked into the keyboard
| input vector, that drove him bonkers by occasionally
| missing, mistyping, and repeating keystrokes,
| indistinguishable from a real flakey keyboard or drunk
| typist.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Because nothing says "I live dangerously" like writing
| your 6502 assembly in memory with the mini assembler
| without saving, then letting your little brother near the
| keyboard.
|
| RESET on the Apple II was a warm reset. You could set a
| value on page zero so that pressing it caused a cold
| start (many apps did that), but, even then, the memory is
| not fully erased on startup, so you'd probably be kind of
| OK.
| Footpost wrote:
| Well since Neuromorphic methods can show that 138240 = 0,
| should it come as as surprise that they enable blockchain on
| Mars?
|
| https://cointelegraph.com/news/neuromorphic-computing-breakt...
| dekhn wrote:
| The article hides the truth which is that it has no direct
| attached durable storage, but is connected via a Fabric to
| existing HPC hardware, which almost certainly loads data to the
| Spinnaker and stores results.
|
| At the end of the day, processors really just load data,
| process, and store back to durable data (or generate some
| visible side effect).
| shrubble wrote:
| You don't have to write anything down if you can keep it in your
| memory...
| timmg wrote:
| Doesn't give a lot of information about what this is for or how
| it works :/
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Love to see a simulator where you can at least run a plodding
| version of some code.
| ymsodev wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04491
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| How much did this cost? I'd rather have CUDA cores.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Part of their job is to evaluate novel technologies. I find
| this quite exciting. CUDA is well understood. This is not.
| fintler wrote:
| They already have CUDA cores in production. This is a lab
| that's looking for the next big thing.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Sandia's business model is different from NVIDIA for sure.
| dedicate wrote:
| I feel like we're just trading one bottleneck for another here.
| So instead of slow storage, we now have a system that's hyper-
| sensitive to any interruption and probably requires a dedicated
| power plant to run.
|
| Cool experiment, but is this actually a practical path forward or
| just a dead end with a great headline? Someone convince me I'm
| wrong...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we 're just trading one bottleneck for another_
|
| If you have two systems with opposite bottlenecks you can build
| a composite system with the bottlenecks reduced.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Usually, you get a state with two bottlenecks ...
| rzzzt wrote:
| Think of L2 cache (small access time, small capacity) vs.
| memory modules (larger access time, large capacity) on a
| motherboard. You get the large capacity and an access time
| somewhere in between, depending on the hit rate.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Sounds like you need a massively parallel hardware regexp
| accelerator (a RePU), so you can have two millions of
| problems!
| tokyolights2 wrote:
| Sandia National Labs is one of the few places in the country
| (on the planet?) doing blue-sky research. My first thought was
| similar to yours--If it doesn't have storage, what can I
| realistically even do with it!?
|
| But sometimes you just have to let the academics cook for a few
| decades and then something fantastical pops out the other end.
| If we ever make something that is truely AGI, its architecture
| is probably going to look more like this SpiNNaker machine than
| anything we are currently using.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > what can I realistically even do with it!?
|
| It doesn't have built-in storage, but that doesn't mean it
| can't connect to external storage, or that its memory cannot
| be retrieved from a front-end computer.
| mipsISA69 wrote:
| This smells like a VC derived sentiment - the only value is
| from identifying the be all end all solution.
|
| There's plenty to learn from endeavors like this, even if this
| particular approach isn't the one that e.g. achieves AGI.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| HPC jobs generally don't stream data to disk in the first
| place. They write out (huge) snapshots periodically. So mount a
| network filesystem and be done with it. I don't see the issue.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| > the SpiNNaker 2's highly parallel architecture has 48 SpiNNaker
| 2 chips per server board, each of which in turn carries 152 based
| cores and specialized accelerators.
|
| NVIDIA step up your game. Now I want to run stuff on based cores.
| marsten wrote:
| Interesting that they converged on a memory/network architecture
| similar to a rack of GPUs.
|
| - 152 cores per chip, equivalent to ~128 CUDA cores per SM
|
| - per-chip SRAM (20 MB) equivalent to SM high-speed shared memory
|
| - per-board DRAM (96 GB across 48 chips) equivalent to GPU global
| memory
|
| - boards networked together with something akin to NVLink
|
| I wonder if they use HBM for the DRAM, or do anything like
| coalescing memory accesses.
| patcon wrote:
| Whenever I hear about neuromorphic computing, I think about the
| guy who wrote this article, who was working in the field:
|
| Thermodynamic Computing https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-
| computing/
|
| It's the most high-influence, low-exposure essay I've ever read.
| As far as I'm concerned, this dude is a silent prescient genius
| working quietly for DARPA, and I had a sneak peak into future
| science when I read it. It's affected my thinking and trajectory
| for the past 8 years
| evolextra wrote:
| Man, this article is incredible. So many ideas resonate with
| me, but I never can't formulate them. Thanks for sharing, all
| my friends have to read this.
| epsilonic wrote:
| If you like this article, you'll probably enjoy reading most
| publications from the Santa Fe Institute.
| afarah1 wrote:
| Interesting read, more so than the OP. Thank you.
| iczero wrote:
| Isn't this just simulated annealing in hardware attached to a
| grandiose restatement of the second law of thermodynamics?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Yes. This keeps showing up in hardware engineering labs, and
| never holds up in real tasks.
| moralestapia wrote:
| It's not.
|
| What an extremely uneducated guess.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Educate, then.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Happy to do it, mail in profile.
|
| Rate is $1,000 USD/hour.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I will say that the philosophical remarks are pretty obtuse and
| detract from the post. For example...
|
| "Physics-and more broadly the pursuit of science-has been a
| remarkably successful methodology for understanding how the
| gears of reality turn. We really have no other methods-and
| based on humanity's success so far we have no reason to believe
| we need any."
|
| Physics, which is to say, physical methods have indeed been
| remarkably successful...for the types of things physical
| methods select for! To say it is exhaustive not only begs the
| question, but the claim itself is not even demonstrable by
| these methods.
|
| The second claim contains the same error, but with more
| emphasis. This is just off-the-shelf scientism, and scientism,
| apart from what withering refutations demonstrate, should be
| obviously self-refuting. Is the claim that "we have no other
| methods but physics" (where physics is the paradigmatic
| empirical science; substitute accordingly) a scientific claim?
| Obviously not. It is a philosophical claim. That already
| refutes the claim.
|
| Thus, philosophy has entered the chat, and this is no small
| concession.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. It's not
| really questionable that science and math are the only things
| to come out of philosophy or any other academic pursuit that
| have actually shown us how to objectively understand reality.
|
| Now physics vs other scientific disciplines sure. Physicists
| love to claim dominion just like mathematicians do. It is
| generally true however that physics = math + reality and that
| we don't actually have any evidence of anything in this world
| existing outside a physical description (eg a lot of physics
| combined = chemistry, a lot of chemistry = biology, a lot of
| biology = sociology etc). Thus it's reasonable to assume that
| the chemistry in this world is 100% governed by the laws of
| physics and transitively this is true for sociology too
| (indeed - game theory is one way we quantifiably explain the
| physical reality of why people behave the way they due). We
| also see this in math where different disciplines have
| different "bridges" between them. Does that mean they're
| actually separate disciplines or just that we've chosen to
| name features on the topology as such.
| MantisShrimp90 wrote:
| Its just not that simple. The best way I can dovetail with
| the author is that you are thinking in terms of the
| abstraction but you have mistaken the abstraction for
| reality.
|
| Physics, biological sciences, these are tools the mind uses
| to try and make guesses about the future based on past
| events. But the abstraction isn't perfect, and its
| questionable on whether or not it could or should one day
| be.
|
| The clear example is that large breakthroughs in science
| often comes from rethinking this fundamental abstraction to
| explain problems that the old implementation had trouble
| with. Case in point being quantum physics which has warped
| how we original understood newtonian physics. Einstein
| fucking hated quantum because he felt it undermined the
| idea of objective reality.
|
| The reality (pun intended) is that it is much more complex
| than our abstractions like science and we would do well to
| remember they are pragmatic tools and are ultimately
| unconcerned with the practice of metaphysics which is the
| underlying nature of reality.
|
| This all seems like philosophy ramblings until we get to
| little lines like this. Scientism, or the belief that
| science is the primary and only necessary lens to
| understand the world falls for the same trap as religion of
| thinking that you have the answer to reality so anything
| else outside is either unnecessary or even dangerous to one
| who holds these views.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I'm not sure I really understand this point. I believe
| that the scientific method (hypothesis, repeated tests,
| reality check) is the only successful method we've
| developed to advance our understanding of how the world
| works. I never claimed it's perfect but that's shaky
| footing that's being injected onto this position. A
| counterclaim has to show that there's something better
| than the scientific method that humans have been engaging
| in for attaining a better understanding of reality.
|
| Often such attempts try to just wholly put themselves
| outside the realm of science which I don't think puts
| them on strong footing. Just like updates to standard
| models still have to explain our current understandings
| of quantum and relativity, alternate methodologies for
| observing reality have to hold up to scientific scrutiny.
|
| But I claim ignorance here. What better mechanisms has
| humanity developed for observing and understanding
| reality?
| dekhn wrote:
| Show us a real example of something that your putative non
| physics science can do that physics cannot, in a way that
| would be comprehensible to a sufficiently open minded
| science.
|
| It seems unlikely you could suggest a concrete alternative to
| physics which explains observable phenomena as well and
| making generalizable predictions. Showing this would move
| your theoretical philosophy. In the meantime the rest of us
| will stick to physics because nobody has a coherent
| alternative which explains our observations.
| ahnick wrote:
| Is this what Extropic (https://www.extropic.ai/) is aiming to
| commercialize and bring to market?
| andrepd wrote:
| This is literally a borderline crank article. "A new framework
| for physics and computing" turns out to be quantum annealing
| for SAT lol
|
| The explanations about quantum mechanics are also imprecise and
| go nowhere towards the point of the article. Add a couple janky
| images and the "crank rant" impression is complete.
| vpribish wrote:
| I dunno, man. strikes me as crazy persecuted-genius syndrome.
| red flags go up from the very start.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| The original intent for this architecture was for modelling large
| spiking neural networks in real-time, although the hardware is
| really not that specialized - basically a bunch of ARM chips with
| high speed interconnect for message passing.
|
| It's interesting that the article doesn't say that's what it's
| actually going to be used for - just event driven (message
| passing) simulations, with application to defense.
| Onavo wrote:
| Probably Ising models, phase transitions, condense matter stuff
| all to help make a bigger boom.
| colordrops wrote:
| > this work will explore how neuromorphic computing can be
| leveraged for the nation's nuclear deterrence missions.
|
| Wasn't that the plot of the movie War Games?
| bob1029 wrote:
| I question how viable these architectures are when considering
| that accurate simulation of a spiking neural network requires
| maintaining strict causality between spikes.
|
| If you don't handle effects in precisely the correct order, the
| simulation will be more about architecture, network topology and
| how race conditions resolve. We need to simulate the behavior of
| a spike preceding another spike in exactly the right way, or
| things like STDP will wildly misfire. The "online learning"
| promise land will turn into a slip & slide.
|
| A priority queue using a quaternary min-heap implementation is
| approximately the fastest way I've found to serialize spikes on
| typical hardware. This obviously isn't how it works in biology,
| but we are trying to simulate biology on a different substrate so
| we must make some compromises.
|
| I wouldn't argue that you couldn't achieve wild success in a
| distributed & more non-deterministic architecture, but I think it
| is a very difficult battle that should be fought after winning
| some easier ones.
| mycall wrote:
| Artem Kirsanov provides some insights into the neurochemistry
| and types of neurons in his latest analysis [0] of distinct
| synaptic plasticity rules that operate across dendritic
| compartments. When simulating neurons in a more realistic
| approach, the timing can be deterministic.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9StHNcGs-JM
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Many Neuromorphic computing platforms are robust at handling
| Globally asynchronous locally synchronous solver hardware.
|
| There are some counterintuitive design choices that emerge, and
| it inevitably leads to vector machines with arbitrary order
| Tensor capabilities.
|
| Have a wonderful day =)
| rahen wrote:
| So if I understand correctly, the hardware paradigm is shifting
| to align with the now-dominant neural-based software model. This
| marks a major shift, from the traditional CPU + OS + UI stack to
| a fully neural-based architecture. Am I getting this right?
| GregarianChild wrote:
| I'd be interested to learn who paid for this machine!
|
| Did Sandia pay list price? Or did SpiNNcloud Systems give it to
| Sandia for free (or at least for a heavily subsidsed price)? I
| conjecture the latter. Maybe someone from Sandia is on the list
| here and can provide detail?
|
| SpiNNcloud Systems is known for making misleading claims, e.g.
| their home page https://spinncloud.com/ lists DeepMind, DeepSeek,
| Meta and Microsoft as "Examples of algorithms already leveraging
| dynamic sparsity", giving the false impression that those
| companies use SpiNNcloud Systems machines, or the specific
| computer architecture SpiNNcloud Systems sells. Their claims
| about energy efficiency (like _" 78x more energy efficient than
| current GPUs"_) seem sketchy. How do they measure energy
| consumption and trade it off against compute capacities: e.g. a
| Raspberry Pi uses less absolute energy than a NVIDIA Blackwell
| but is this a meaningful comparison?
|
| I'd also like to know how to program this machine. Neuromorphic
| computers have so far been terribly difficult to program. E.g.
| have JAX, TensorFlow and PyTorch been ported to SpiNNaker 2? I
| doubt it.
| floren wrote:
| As an ex-employee (and I even did some HPC) I am not aware of
| any instances of Sandia receiving computing hardware for free.
| prpl wrote:
| no but sometimes they are for demonstration/evaluation,
| though that wouldn't usually make a press release
| rbanffy wrote:
| Unless the manufacturer makes it.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Deep Mind (Google's reinforcement learning lab), Deep Seek
| (Alibaba's LLM initiative), Deep Crack (EFF's DES cracker),
| Deep Blue (IBM's chess computer), and Deep Thought (Douglas
| Adams' universal brain) all set the stage...
|
| So naturally, this thing should be called Deep Spike, Deep
| Spin, Deep Discount, or -- given its storage-free design --
| Deep Void.
|
| If it can accelerated nested 2D FORTRAN loops, you could even
| call it Deep DO DO, and the next deeper version would naturally
| be called Deep #2.
|
| JD Vance and Peter Thiel could gang up, think long and hard
| hard, go all in, and totally get behind vigorously pushing and
| fully funding a sexy supercomputer with more comfortably
| upholstered, luxuriously lubricated, passively penetrable
| cushioned seating than even a Cray-1, called Deep Couch. And
| the inevitable jealous break-up would be more fun to watch than
| the Musk-Trump Bromance!
| justinclift wrote:
| > or -- given its storage-free design -- Deep Void.
|
| Sounds like the big brother of Dev Null? :)
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I don't know, but just wanted to say that my son got a job
| there as a mechanical engineer, and I couldn't be more proud.
| He can't tell me much because of classified status, but I can
| tell he loves his job and who he works with. Just sending
| praise to Sandia
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| If it doesn't have an OS, how does it...run? Is it just connected
| to a host machine and used like a giant GPU?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| How does an OS "run"?
| StressedDev wrote:
| You can run software on bare metal without an OS. The downside
| is you have to write everything. That means drivers, networking
| code, the process abstraction (if you need it), etc.
|
| One thing to remember is an operating system is just another
| computer program.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| At that point, you'd call the software stack an OS and not
| declare it to not have an OS
| rbanffy wrote:
| Do GPUs have OSs? Or is it the host computer that sets up
| memory with data and programs and starts the processing units
| running?
| mikewarot wrote:
| I see "storage-free"... and then learn it still has RAM (which IS
| storage) ugh.
|
| John Von Neumann's concept of the instruction counter was great
| for the short run, but eventually we'll all learn it was a
| premature optimization. All those transistors tied up as RAM just
| waiting to be used most of the time, a huge waste.
|
| In the end, high speed computing will be done on an evolution of
| FPGAs, where everything is pipelined and parallel as heck.
| thyristan wrote:
| FPGAs are implemented as tons of lookup-tables (LUTs).
| Basically a special kind of SRAM.
| mikewarot wrote:
| The thing about the LUT memory is that it's _all_ accessed in
| parallel, not just a 64 bits at a time or so.
| thyristan wrote:
| Not all, not always. FPGAs usually have more memory than is
| accessible in parallel (because memory cells are a lot
| cheaper than routing grid) and most customers want some
| blockram anyways. So what your synthesis tool will do with
| very high LUT usage is to do input or output multiplexing.
| Or even halving your effective clock and doubling your
| "number" of LUTs by doing multi-step lookups in then non-
| parallel memory.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The pessimist in me thinks someone will just use it to mine
| bitcoin after all the official research is completed.
| pier25 wrote:
| Imagine if this is actually Skynet and the apocalyptic AI is
| called Sandia instead :)
|
| (Sandia means watermelon in Spanish)
| m463 wrote:
| When I first learned that, the prestigious-sounding "sandia
| national labs" became "watermelon national labs" and I couldn't
| help but laugh.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| The title describes this machine as "brain-like" but the article
| doesn't support that conclusion. Why is it brain-like?
|
| I also don't understand why this machine is interesting. It has a
| lot of RAM.... ok, and? I could get a consumer-grade PC with a
| large amount of RAM (admittedly not _quite_ as much), put my
| applications in a ramdisk, e.g. tmpfs, and get the same benefit.
|
| In short, what is the big deal?
| groby_b wrote:
| Calling 138240 TB of DRAM "storage-free" is... impressive.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's volatile storage. It needs to connect to other systems in
| order to operate.
| anArbitraryOne wrote:
| I love bio-inspired stuff, but can we (collectively) temper our
| usage of it? A better name for this would probably be something
| like distributed storage and computing architecture (or someone
| who really understands what this thing is please come up with a
| better name). If they want to say that part of the architecture
| is bio-inspired, or mammalian brain inspired, than fine, but
| let's be parsimonious
| latchkey wrote:
| I was tasked with getting 20,000 PS5 APU's online. ASRock BC-250.
| Each chassis had 12 independent blades and in order to save
| money, we decided to not put SSD/NVMe into them and iPXE boot
| them instead. Each APU had 16GB of memory, but the only issue was
| that it wasn't ECC, so they would randomly fail.
|
| It took a lot of effort but it actually worked!
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