Axios: Oak Ridge National Laboratory To Get New Supercomputer

Axios:

“Chipmaker AMD, long in Intel’s shadow, will be at the heart of one of the world’s most powerful new supercomputers, a new Cray machine being built for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Why it matters: Though such large-scale computers represent a tiny fraction of the market, they still power advanced basic research — and confer bragging rights on those institutions, companies and, increasingly, nations whose devices top the annual rankings.

Details: The contract between the DOE and Cray is valued at $600 million.

The system, known as Frontier, is planned to debut in 2021 and is expected to be the world’s most powerful computer, with a performance of greater than 1.5 exaflops. (An exaflop is a quintillion, or a billion billion, calculations per second.)

Frontier will be housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in eastern Tennessee. It will use more than 90 miles of cable and occupy 7,300 square feet. …”

Very interesting.

So, AMD has a $600 million dollar government contract to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy. Wait a minute … isn’t the federal government funding research and development at installations like Oak Ridge National Laboratory in east Tennessee where we developed the atomic bomb not the essence of socialism?

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is also showing off cutting edge 3D printing technologies like nuclear micro-reactor parts. Isn’t that socialism though?

“Oak Ridge National Laboratory will show off an assortment of 3D-printed objects, including a submarine, nuclear micro-reactor parts and a turbine blade, Tuesday morning during a tour by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, according to a news release.

The reactor parts will be the first 3D-printed pieces used in a nuclear reactor, the announcement said.

The laboratory is hosting the Department of Energy’s third InnovationXLab, focusing on advanced manufacturing. Various DOE officials were scheduled to speak during the Advanced Manufacturing Summit.

Summit participants include representatives from the 17 national laboratories, private companies, government officials, investors, universities and others working on energy efficiency, according to a DOE announcement. …”

U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick “Fed Up” Perry ironically drives around in a 3D printed vehicle developed at state-subsidized Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, one of 17 national laboratories, while preaching the “capitalism vs. socialism” canard for the Trump administration. He is riding around with retiring Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

What do you mean “the state” is developing new technologies? Everyone knows only the entrepreneur is capable of doing that! That’s why the benefits are privatized!

Why shouldn’t that be left up to the superior free-market capitalist system to fund the research and develop a Cray supercomputer? Why is the state intervening in the economy and redistributing resources from taxpayers to “take on China”? Isn’t this what we really did back during the Space Race when we set aside the triumphalist free-market platitudes to catch up with the Soviets?

How much of our current research and development goes on in the government financed labs like Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 21st century? If the private sector is cooperating and coordinating with the federal government to develop and implement new technologies, then why are we browbeating the Chinese for doing the exact same thing?

It’s time for a president who is honest about the reality of capitalism for once. #Yang2020

Note: In the Southern History Series, I’ve been dying to get around to how we built Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and how both are successful examples of our secret history of practicing developmental capitalism while preaching the shibboleths of free-market capitalism for the working class and foreigners.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

10 Comments

  1. Look at NoVA and the era around the beltway. Everyone of those people are literally living off some form of government contract and yet all of them preach the wonders of “free-market/free-trade” capitalism to blue collar men in PA and MI. The whole thing is a joke.The richest people in America are getting fat and wealthy off of government contracts.

  2. Unlike a private corporation, the government doesn’t have to support itself financially. Therefore, it can devote its entire efforts and resources to pure R&D, without the need to earn a profit.

    If factories go from being traditional buildings filled with machines, to being building sized machines that consume energy and raw materials, and spit out products, then there’s no reason why governments or communities, or the public, couldn’t own some of them.

    Imagine buying products that are indistinguishable from products made by private companies, but the profits go into government coffers and reduce taxes by the amount earned, or into UBI or free grants for whatever.

  3. What are they going to do with all of that computing power? Maybe, a propulsion system for spacecraft? They don’t need all of that computer power to feed a milling machine…someone is bullshitting us big time.

  4. HW, Did you see that poll that Michael Tracey tweeted today?

    Yang is polling best among atheists and agnostics according to a democratic poll based on religious identification.

    Biden is doing best among Protestants and Catholics.

    Ironically, Sanders is polling at only 11% among jews.

    Poor Tulsi isn’t breaking 2% with any religious group. ?

  5. “Wait a minute … isn’t the federal government funding research and development at installations like Oak Ridge National Laboratory in east Tennessee where we developed the atomic bomb not the essence of socialism?”

    Is that a serious question, or are you just being flippant?

    “Oak Ridge National Laboratory is also showing off cutting edge 3D printing technologies like nuclear micro-reactor parts. Isn’t that socialism though?”

    Again: Is that a serious question, or are you just being flippant?

      • Not having read what persons who’ve thought about the subject have written, I can say only that my gut feeling is that the government shouldn’t be spending tax dollars to develop technology that doesn’t have to do more-or-less directly with governance.

        I won’t attempt a complete list of what I think falls under “governance”; but some of the things would be the military, the police, the courts, geographical surveying, census-taking, weather-monitoring, some kinds of exploration, and, I don’t know, maybe infrastructure things that can’t quite be arranged as private property.

        Spending to develop technology for anything else would be, in my view, yes, socialism, though that’s not the term I prefer. (The terminology is another subject.)

  6. Whatever it is it will not be used to make the average White American’s life one iota better.

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