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Opposition to datacenters: it's not just for the Bernie Sanders crowd anymore. An arch-conservative running for the governorship of a solidly Republican state has called for a datacenter moratorium in one of the clearest signs yet that the tech sector is facing a backlash against its AI ambitions. US Representative and gubernatorial candidate Nancy Mace (R-SC) on Monday called for a one-year moratorium on new datacenter projects in her state, saying that reports of the southeastern state becoming a hot destination for datacenters don’t mean her constituents ought to see their power bills rise. "South Carolina is not Big Tech's personal power grid," Mace said in a statement published on Monday in her capacity as a congressional representative. "These companies are planting massive data centers across our state, driving up energy demand, and leaving families and small businesses to pick up the tab. South Carolinians are already stretched thin. The last thing they need is a higher electricity bill subsidizing Big Tech's bottom line." Mace said a one-year pause on new projects would give the state an opportunity to implement rules ensuring any future projects include protections that wouldn’t cause residents to pay more for electricity. She also said she does not want eminent domain seizures of private property on the table either, pointing to an ongoing matter in South Carolina’s neighboring state, Georgia. Mace’s concerns over datacenters leading to higher energy costs aren't an unrealized fear, either. As we reported last week, wholesale power costs in the largest US energy market, the PJM Interconnection, rose by 75 percent over the past year due to datacenter growth. South Carolina isn’t part of the PJM, but if it’s a hot destination for datacenter projects, one could assume similar pains might be felt there if more datacenter operators come knocking. Mace has made statements about datacenters through her gubernatorial campaign as well, calling for South Carolina to adopt legislation that would require datacenter projects to cover their own energy costs, as well as expressing opposition to a bill designed to regulate datacenter development. “While initially appearing to be a framework for sensible regulation, a dissection of this bill illustrates it is a masterclass in corporate welfare while leaving the hardworking citizens of South Carolina to foot the bill and suffer the consequences,” Mace said of South Carolina Senate Bill 867. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows To call Mace a conservative is a bit of an understatement: She’s been deep in President Donald Trump’s MAGA camp for years. She and Trump have had an on-again/off-again relationship due to her opposition to Trump’s handling of the January 6 insurrection, insistence on the release of the Epstein files, and uncertainty regarding the Iran war, but she’s continued to support him and seek his endorsement for her race to lead South Carolina. In other words, she’s about as conservative as they come - she’s even called herself “Trump in high heels” in a bid to earn votes in the governor’s race. Speaking of Trump, the President has been a major proponent for datacenter expansion in the US, though he has also called for DC operators to provide their own power without increasing costs for other ratepayers. As for South Carolina, it isn’t exactly a toss-up state in terms of federal or state electoral politics. The governorship has been in Republican hands since 2003, and a Democrat hasn’t won a statewide election there since 2006. The state’s presidential vote has gone to a Republican in 13 of the last 14 elections, with Jimmy Carter’s 1976 win in the state the sole exception. The South Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary is scheduled for June 9, and the race is tight. Mace’s victory isn’t guaranteed - she’s leading in some polls, but competition is fierce heading into the final stretch. If Mace is trotting out a datacenter moratorium plan with less than a month before the primary, she’s trying to win votes, suggesting citizens in deeply conservative South Carolina are just as opposed to bit barns as those everywhere else. Polling outfit Gallup recently reported that more than 70 percent of Americans are opposed to datacenter projects in their neighborhoods, making opposition to new projects something folks on both sides of the aisle are coming together over. That said, Mace doesn’t appear to be entirely opposed to the use of AI (she’s pushed a bill to train federal government employees on the use of the tech) or datacenter projects done responsibly (her moratorium isn’t calling for the state to ban new datacenter projects). “When it is over, the rules are simple: datacenters pay their own way or they do not come here,” Mace said of future datacenter projects in her state. Mace’s teams didn’t respond to specific questions about her broader positions on AI or datacenter projects. ®

Of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, nine of the top 10 are powered by GPUs, but that might not be the case for much longer. As chipmakers like Nvidia prioritize AI FLOPS over the ultra-precise floating point calculations used in scientific computing, US National Labs are turning to new chip architectures to get their FP64 fix. Among the candidates is NextSilicon’s Maverick-2, a dataflow processor designed explicitly with the 64-bit floating point mathematics that dominate the Department of Energy’s most important simulations. Despite its name, the Department of Energy is concerned with far more than the US’ power grid. It operates some of the largest publicly known supercomputers in the world, which are responsible for everything from simulating the physics of nuclear weapons at the moment of criticality and bioweapons defense to public health and safety. Since the Titan Supercomputer made its debut in 2012, a growing number of these supercomputers have been powered by GPUs from Nvidia, and more recently AMD. But that’s not the case for Sandia National Laboratory’s new Spectra supercomputer, which was built in collaboration with Penguin Solutions and NextSilicon. Compared to exascale systems like Frontier or El Capitan, Spectra is tiny. The machine counts 64 nodes and 128 of NextSilicon’s “runtime-configurable” accelerators. But scale isn’t the point. Spectra is a test bed for NextSilicon’s Maverick-2. This week, Sandia gave the chips the thumbs up, announcing that the big iron had met all of its system acceptance requirements, opening the door for the chips to be deployed in larger systems in the future. Not another GPU Despite some similarities to Nvidia’s B200, Maverick-2 is a very different beast. Instead of the standard von Neumann compute architecture that underpins most CPUs and GPUs today, NextSilicon’s chips employ a reconfigurable dataflow architecture. The processor’s two compute dies comprise a grid of arithmetic logic units interconnected in a graph. Each unit is configured at runtime to perform a specific operation, whether it be addition, multiplication, or some other logic operation. But the chip’s real trick is overlapping data flow and compute. As soon as data reaches the next unit in the pipeline, it’s computed immediately, no waiting for load-store operations to shuffle data around. According to NextSilicon, this dramatically improves the performance and efficiency of the chips in real-world workloads. Dataflow architectures aren’t new. Groq, Cerebras, and SambaNova have all built chips based on the concept. However, all of these designs are aimed at AI inference or training. NextSilicon’s is one of the few we’ve seen aimed at HPC. Dataflow is notoriously difficult to program for, which is likely why the chip startups that have built chips around it have largely offered them as a managed or white glove service rather than selling bare metal servers. Rather than trying to port workloads to run on its chips, NextSilicon has built a compiler that it claims allows it to run any existing C, Python, Fortran, or CUDA codebases on its chips. As we understand it, it works by initially running these workloads on the CPU. The compiler then captures the compute graph, maps it to the chips, and then optimizes it to maximize performance. With Spectra, Sandia has now validated the parts across three key workloads: the high-performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) benchmark, the LAMMPS molecular dynamics test suite, and the Sparta Monte Carlo simulation suite. AI is changing GPUs NextSilicon’s focus on HPC comes in stark contrast to the next generation of GPUs from Nvidia. The company’s Rubin GPUs due out later this year promise gobs of memory bandwidth and up to 50 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute. This makes the chips strong contenders for AI inference and training workloads, which is probably why the DoE is also deploying them in systems like the Doudna supercomputer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. While FP64 compute remains relevant for many existing scientific workloads, for AI workloads, Nvidia's GPUs are still relevant to US Labs. However, all those AI FLOPS come at the expense of hardware FP64 vector and matrix performance. Rubin tops out at 33 teraFLOPS, making it slower than even Nvidia’s nearly four-year-old H100. But that’s not to say it’s not good for scientific computing. For matrix heavy workloads like High Performance Linpack (HPL), Nvidia is leaning on a somewhat controversial spin on the Ozaki scheme, which uses lower precision data types to emulate FP64 compute. Using this approach, Nvidia claims Rubin can deliver up to 200 teraFLOPS of FP64 matrix performance. We dug deeper into Nvidia’s emulated FP64 algorithms earlier this year, but suffice to say it’s not perfect. While it has shown promise in certain HPC workloads, in others, particularly vector-heavy ones, like computational fluid dynamics, it offers little if any benefit. Coincidentally, the latter happens to be the same kind of workload that NextSilicon has focused its attention on. We don’t yet have system-level benchmarks for NextSilicon’s hardware, much less Spectra, but we’re told a single Maverick-2 can deliver about 600 gigaFLOPS of FP64 compute HPCG. The startup claims this performance is roughly on par with leading GPUs while consuming half the power. While Nvidia is clearly prioritizing AI compute in its latest generation of GPUs, AMD has taken a different approach. Like Rubin, AMD’s new MI455X accelerators are tuned for AI inference and training, but it’s only one of several versions of the GPU the House of Zen has baked in TSMC’s oven. For the MI430X, AMD swapped out the AI-centric compute dies for some built specifically for HPC. Earlier this month, we learned the chip would deliver up to 200 teraFLOPS of peak FP64 grunt to the DoE’s upcoming Discovery and Europe's Alice Recoque supercomputers. Who needs GPUs anyway? Chip startups like NextSilicon still need to prove their chips can scale to larger systems. But, across the Pacific, China has already shown that, at least for scientific computing, it doesn’t need GPUs to compete with the West’s best supers. China has a history of building boutique silicon specifically to advance its national supercomputing capability. Some systems, like the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, used a custom manycore processor like 260 custom RISC processors. Others, like the Tianhe 2A, used a homegrown digital signal processor (DSP) called the Matrix 2000 for its FP64 compute. More recently, we caught wind of a new supercomputer, called the LineShine, that, similar to the TaihuLight machine, reportedly uses 47,000 custom CPUs, which are expected to push the machine to 2 exaFLOPS of FP64 grunt. Of course, because China doesn’t participate in the annual Top500 ranking of the fastest publicly known supers anymore, we may never know for sure. China’s use of boutique silicon is due in part to US trade restrictions on the sale of high-end accelerators in the region. Even where still legal, these chips have become a supply chain vulnerability for Beijing. In fact, the US government’s decision to bar Intel from selling its Xeon Phi processors to China drove the development of the Matrix 2000. In the US, the bigger challenge may be competing with chip designers' shareholders. AI has made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world; HPC by comparison remains an important, albeit niche market. ®

• Spurs need a draw at Chelsea to effectively secure safety

• ‘It’s good to imagine celebrating the win in their stadium’

Roberto De Zerbi says the idea that “everyone wants Tottenham relegated” ought to motivate his players as they look to set aside the club’s dismal record against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge to get the result they need to stay up.

Spurs have won once at Stamford Bridge since 1990 but they need only a draw on Tuesday night to all but ensure they survive in the Premier League and West Ham go down.

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• Guardiola has been manager of club for 10 years

• He is set to go with one year left on his contract

Pep Guardiola is expected to leave Manchester City after 10 trophy-filled years as manager.

The club did not confirm reports on Monday night that Guardiola’s last game as City manager will be at home to Aston Villa on Sunday, the final day of the Premier League season. But increasingly figures around the club expect an announcement before the end of the season. Guardiola’s camp has been approached for comment.

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It was a night when fervour and hope ran into yet more Arsenal anxiety. This was supposed to be straightforward, wasn’t it? Burnley’s relegation from the Premier League was confirmed on 22 April. They sacked their manager, Scott Parker, shortly afterwards and came here under the caretaker, Michael Jackson. They had avoided defeat only three times in their previous ten league matches, drawing all three.

It was not straightforward. Arsenal laboured under the spectre of the mother and father of all calamities. It nagged away during a traumatic second-half. Everybody knew that with the margins so tight it might take only one flash from Burnley; a bolt from the sky blue. If Arsenal do stagger over the line and win their first title since 2004, they will have done it in nerve-shredding fashion.

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Teruhide Tomori has added a photo to the pool:

Location : Amanohashidate View Land
Monju, Miyazu, Kyoto.

天橋立 / 天橋立ビューランド 京都府宮津市字文珠

Fantasy friends, Sarah Theresa Lee

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Going back to grad school has long been the Plan B of young professionals who aspire to climb higher in their careers or struggle to get promoted in a tough job market. New data show that getting a master's degree isn't the guarantee it used to be. The unemployment rate for workers under 35 with a master's degree has rarely been higher in the past 20 years, according to the Burning Glass Institute, a labor-market think tank focused on the future of work, which analyzed data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics going back to 2003.

At the same time, the unemployment rate for workers under 35 with a Ph.D., law degree or medical degree has rarely been lower. "For most of the past two decades, these lines moved together -- not anymore," said Gad Levanon, chief economist of Burning Glass. Levanon has a theory about why the payoffs for advanced degrees have uncoupled: "More degrees chasing fewer of the positions those degrees were meant to unlock." [...] While degrees from law school and medical school amount to a license to practice, master's degrees are more of a signal, Levanon said. And a signal loses value when so many people have one, he added: "It's hardly a sure bet to securing a good job."

Now master's-degree holders under 35 are at the 77th percentile of unemployment, where the 50th percentile is normal, according to the Burning Glass analysis. Even associate-degree holders have had a higher employment level for the past year. Unemployment among master's-degree holders has been worse only about a quarter of the time in the past 20-plus years. There was a stint during the Covid-19 pandemic when this cohort was out of work at higher rates, and a more prolonged stretch as the U.S. climbed out of the recession in 2008 and 2009. "Every indication is hiring managers now are more receptive than ever to the idea that a person doesn't need a graduate degree to be competitive," said Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president of SHRM, the chief lobbying group for human-resource professionals.

"We are seeing that, hands down, especially in the last two or three years with AI," he said of job readiness. Employers just want to know, "Can you do it?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“I have travelled all over the world in the last 30 years, and have never seen anything like the density of assholes I just encountered in Japan, [i.e.] tourists being an unbearable menace specifically while on and around their phones.”

MINNEAPOLIS (ANP/AFP/RTR) - Aanklagers in de Amerikaanse staat Minnesota hebben een 53-jarige agent van de immigratie- en douanedienst ICE aangeklaagd wegens onder meer mishandeling met behulp van een gevaarlijk vuurwapen. De aanklacht heeft betrekking op schoten die half januari zijn gelost op een Venezolaanse migrant die in het been werd getroffen.

Dat gebeurde tijdens een door president Donald Trump bevolen grootschalige en omstreden actie van de federale dienst ICE tegen illegale immigratie in Minnesota. Daarbij werden ook twee Amerikanen gedood.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Gidi Markuszower, die vorige week zei dat Palestijnse vluchtelingen die vanuit Griekenland zijn gekomen "met maximaal geweld" moeten worden tegengehouden bij de grens, moet voor premier Rob Jetten (D66) steviger afstand nemen van die uitspraken. Markuszower nuanceerde zijn oproep tot geweld, maar bleef achter de strekking staan. Tot die tijd zal Markuszower, die samen met andere PVV-afsplitsers zeven zetels heeft in de Tweede Kamer, niet "vooraan in de rij staan om als partner mee samen te werken".

Markuszower verliet de PVV omdat hij vond dat leider Geert Wilders te weinig voor elkaar kreeg. Met de zes andere afsplitsers wilde Markuszower zich constructiever opstellen. Hij hielp de coalitie onder meer door niet direct de bezuinigingen op de sociale zekerheid weg te stemmen.

De oproep tot "maximaal geweld" leidde tot grote verontwaardiging. "Het zou goed zijn als hij zijn uitspraken steviger terugneemt", zei Jetten maandagavond. Zo niet, dan wordt samenwerking "ingewikkeld".

SAN DIEGO (ANP) - Een grote politiemacht, inclusief pantserwagens, is in de Californische stad San Diego opgetrokken rond een islamitisch centrum met moskee in de wijk Clairmont. Er zou een schutter in het complex actief zijn, meldt de burgemeester van de stad,Todd Gloria.

De politie heeft op sociale media toegevoegd dat de toestand "onder controle" is. Er werd daarbij melding gemaakt van het "neutraliseren" van de dreiging. Volgens plaatselijke media zouden twee verdachten zijn neergeschoten.

Volgens de Amerikaanse overheid is het risico op een uitbraak in de VS laag, maar toch mogen mensen die in de voorbije drie weken één van de drie landen hebben bezocht, de VS niet in. De maatregel is per direct van kracht en geldt voor de komende dertig dagen.

Cockrow Bridge in Surrey will open in the coming weeks to provide wildlife, including lizards and insects, with the ability to move between fragmented habitats. The bridge itself is a floating patch of nature reserve; its contents were excavated and transplanted from the heathland on either side. Heather, the tough wiry shrub that defines heathland, is already springing up in purples and yellows above the A3's roar, supporting the area's insects and reptiles. "They can feed here, get cover, they can bask, they can breed," says Herd. Ground-nesting birds, such as nightjars, woodlarks and Dartford warblers, will also benefit from the newly connected landscape. (Surrey, South East England.)

Destination Goa 5