It is beyond me how they managed to acquire such funding. Sounds a lot like an earlier quantum computing effort which pivoted to "AI" as well: https://zapataquantum.com
the connection I'm making is that both sit on the same interface: the CUDA driver api (module load, launch, memcpy).
the paper is about compiling kernels using safe rust instead of CUDA C++, what I did is reimplement the other side of it using rust for the calls from inside a VM get forwarded over vsock to the host driver via api-remoting.
- All the experiments use GPUs which come straight from the vendors.
- Most of the computing isn't even on site, it's distributed around the world in various computing centers. Yes they also overflow into cloud computing but various publicly funded datacenters tend to be cheaper (or effectively "free" because they were allocated to CERN experiments).
Some very specific elements (those in the detector) need to be radiation hard and need O(microsecond) latency. These custom electronics are built all over the world by contributing national labs and universities.
CERN builds almost next to nothing anymore. Half a century ago they really did do RF cavities, cooling, electronics etc. Not anymore. It is either COTS (DELL, Alterra etc.) or chiefly vendor bidding for some custom parts. Much like what NASA (from Rocketdyne, TRW to Boeing and SpaceX) or copycat ESA (Airbus, DLR, BAE's suppliers) does today.
It is a project bureau. Everything is essentially outsourced, leaving a management shell institute to parade for VIPs. Actually they are close to completely forgetting what they already knew in the hard sciences domain.
Everyone needs to agree on a place to put the LHC, and a lot of the accelerator team is on sight and probably should be payed by CERN, but they have a clear set of KPIs for that: they need to get the machine up to design energy and luminosity and hold it there. The CERN accelerator and civil engineering teams are pretty impressive and have mostly done their job.
The rest of the scientific community can (and does) organize into pseudo-autonomous collaborations that draft proposals for what to do with the real-estate around the collision points and beam dumps. The vast majority of these people don't work for CERN.
I do hope that sufficient humiliation will suffice for DB leadership to enact harsh measures. German precision and punctuality are still there in its people. It's not lost yet.
The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind well. It depends where you're from -- there is always potential for dramatic change in a people as obedient as the German.
I've been trying my hand at RL envs for various sparse matrix algorithms in CUDA. It's easy to generate code that "looks good", "novel" and "fast". Escaping the distribution and actually creating novel sequences of instructions or even patterns (has any model come with something as useful as fan-in/fan-out or double buffering patterns that's now ubiquituous?) seems difficult to say the least.
