[FRIAM] OpenAI goes to LANL

[Marcus Daniels]

I was disappointed that LANL didn’t invest in large scale solar. They just get power from the county and have a couple of dedicated coal-powered turbines. It is the Department of Energy for goodness’s sake, they should be a leader on it. They even have a hillside there where they could do pumped hydro. 

My impression is that LANL on the production side is still reluctant to adopt AI. Anyone that has worked there could probably guess why, but I won’t further comment! [lol] On the Office of Science funding side, I think it is more progressive. 

In any case, national lab HPC is pretty much quaint now compared to the AI datacenters. 

https://semianalysis.com/2024/09/04/multi-datacenter-training-openais/ <_blank> 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
Date: Friday, January 31, 2025 at 3:44 PM
To: friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] OpenAI goes to LANL 

https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0130-open-ai <https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0130-open-ai> 
Los Alamos National Laboratory has entered a partnership with OpenAI to install its latest o-series models — capable of expert reasoning for a broad span of complex scientific problems — on the Lab’s Venado <https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0415-venado> supercomputer, which uses NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, to conduct national security research. 


I've been out of the loop (mostly) at LANL going on 15 years so few if any of the players I knew when I was in HPC will still be players now. 
It wasn't that long ago (May 24) the Musk hisself "flew in" (?) to Los Alamos to chat up his impending Collossus cluster in TN? 


https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/a-lot-of-science-elon-musk-takes-private-tour-of-los-alamos-national-laboratory/article_d0de8bde-1940-11ef-b318-e7aeab106940.html
<https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/a-lot-of-science-elon-musk-takes-private-tour-of-los-alamos-national-laboratory/article_d0de8bde-1940-11ef-b318-e7aeab106940.html>


I understand that the cooling/facility requirements for HPC these days is roughly double that of the actual power consumption of the gear itself for about 2.5MW for Venado (not sure how many other signifcant clusters/machines are operating right now). 
In my college days (northern AZ) they were just decomissioning the steam plant heat that not only heated all the buildings but was transmitted in tunnels under the sidewalks with limited insulation, leading many sidewalks around campus to be ice and snow free most of the time. Maybe LANL (and LA proper?) could just use the street/sidewalk system as a vascular cooling system? 
in D (Decision Application) Division, there were a few (pretty lamely conceived) ideas around using ML to build compressed models to use in place of the real (often compute intensive) simulation models... the biggest problem was that the promoters understood even less than I do about the roughness of such landscapes (nonlinear models exhibiting variations on power-law scaling of structure). 


My intuition suggests that thoughtful application of LLMs and other transformer models in these contexts *might* well provide significant leverage but at the same time, I expect the projects to actually flagship for this effort to be grandstanders, not meat and potatoes. 




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