Hot Chips 2021 Keynote Live Blog: Department of Energy on AI Chips

12:55PM EDT - Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.

12:55PM EDT - Starts at five past the hour

01:03PM EDT - Third keynote from the US government

01:05PM EDT - 'I don't claim to speak for the US government'

01:05PM EDT - 'These are my views'

01:06PM EDT - This is what I worry about

01:06PM EDT - Science and technology evolve differently but are intertwined

01:07PM EDT - Technology leads science and science leads technology

01:09PM EDT - Department of Energy is really the Energy of Everything

01:09PM EDT - Have to report to the president every year in March

01:11PM EDT - he's talking a lot about DoE holistically

01:11PM EDT - DoE 'solves problems no-one else can'

01:12PM EDT - 17 national labs, workforce of 100k

01:13PM EDT - it's not about being faster, it's about being smarter

01:13PM EDT - provide actionable decisions

01:14PM EDT - 'Can't talk about everything we do'

01:14PM EDT - Not necessarily specialists but know how to tackle complex problems.

01:15PM EDT - questions asked are often ill-defined

01:16PM EDT - moving towards exascale

01:18PM EDT - DoE was hammered by congress due to Fugaku

01:18PM EDT - Did a top-to-bottom review

01:18PM EDT - DoE does things that are viewed to be nuts but they prove fruitful

01:19PM EDT - 3 years ahead of Darpa programme to get to petascale with PS3

01:19PM EDT - Defining things for a purpose - to solve problems, and these are the instruments

01:22PM EDT - Learning how to solve complex problems

01:23PM EDT - Learning how to model

01:24PM EDT - quoting von Neumann

01:26PM EDT - Our largest computer simulations stress our largest systems - architectures have historically been developed to solve equations and not to deal with data at tomorrow's scale

01:29PM EDT - Working on Fukushima, had to answer in an hour about whether to evac US citizens from Tokyo

01:30PM EDT - Non trivial problem if you decide to do that

01:32PM EDT - no metrics for how close you might be with some of these decisions at the high level

01:34PM EDT - This is what the DoE does

01:35PM EDT - More about 'just simulate faster won't help'

01:37PM EDT - DoE is a big customer of SambaNova

01:38PM EDT - There's Cerebras, Groq, Graphcore

01:38PM EDT - Think beyond just the immediate market on chips

01:39PM EDT - Need to do much more of this

01:42PM EDT - Every slide is getting a long descriptive treatment, but there's little to bite

01:44PM EDT - Creating petabytes of data with petascale systems

01:45PM EDT - No longer can one person be the top-to-bottom solution for epiphanies

01:47PM EDT - health worries about rare outcomes

01:50PM EDT - Still waiting for the chip talk

01:51PM EDT - waiting to see if reconciliation passes in the house for money for the CHIPS Act

01:55PM EDT - Q&A Time

01:57PM EDT - Q: What do future chips look like? A: PIM is good, need to revisit the architectures. Old systems were locked into the world we've grown into. This used to be the only ways to do things. The 40s was the last time we did clean sheet top-to-bottom how we do things changed

02:02PM EDT - Q: Should the DoE develop its own chips, or buy commercial silicon? A: Have done it in the past. But have to have an ecosystem. Over time, perspective has been tweaking company roadmaps, doing the RNE, aligning it with DoE requirements. Has to be sustainable. Having a design others build is an idea, but working with the private sector is important. DoE understands roadmaps and gets involved, are there points of intersection with DoE and these private companies. Not always a point, but conversations start early

02:04PM EDT - Q: Startup investment A: Investing in startups unlike VCs - our investments involve thigns that have worked involve data modalities - well organized scientific data and sparse data. They invest with data. Have a place to exercise technologies that work for problems they face. Not organized enough to have a big enough aperture into the private market to do this - we need more test beds to give real data to people offering to solve real problems

02:05PM EDT - ROI for DoE is different to VC

02:06PM EDT - That's a wrap