this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
17 points (74.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
45688 readers
803 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
A super computer isn't just a single computer, it's a lot of them networked together to greatly expand the calculation scaling. If you can imagine a huge data center, with thousands of racks of hardware, CPUs, GPUs and RAM chips all dedicated to the tasks of managing network traffic for major websites, its very similar to that but instead of being built to handle all the ins and outs and complexities of managing network traffic, it's purely dedicated to doing as many calculations for a specific task, such as protein folding as someone else mentioned, or something like Pixar's Render Farm, which is hundreds of GPUs all networked together dedicated solely to the task of rendering frames.
With how big and complex any given 3d scenes are in any given Pixar film one single GPU might take 10 hours to calculate the light bounces in a scene to render a single frame, assuming a 90 minute run time, that ~130,000 frames, which is potentially 1,300,000 hours (or about 150 years) to complete just 1 full movie render on a single GPU. If you have 2 GPUs working on rendering frames, you've now cut that time down to 650,000 hours. Throw 100 GPUs at the render, we've cut time to 13,000 hours, or about a year and a half. Pixar is pretty quiet about their numbers but at least according to the Science of Pixar traveling exhibit during the time of Monster University in 2013, their render farm had about 2000 machines with 24,000 processing cores, and it took 2 years worth of rendering time to render that movie out, and I can only imagine how much bigger their render farm has gotten since then.
Source: https://sciencebehindpixar.org/pipeline/rendering
You're not building a super computer to be able to play Crysis, you're building a super computer to do lots and lots and lots of math that might take centuries of calculation to do on a single 16 core machine.