i wish people wouldn't make stuff up just to sound cool.
like do you have actual experience with gov/edu HPC? i doubt it because you couldn't be more wrong - lab HPC clusters are just very very poorly (relative to FAANG) strewn together nodes. there is absolutely no sense in which they are "one single machine" (nothing is "abstracted over" except NFS).
what you're saying is trivially false because no one ever requests all the machines at once (except when they're running linpack to produce top500 numbers). the rest of the time the workflow is exactly like in any industrial cluster: request some machines (through slurm), get those machines, run your job (hopefully you distributed the job across the nodes correctly), release those machines. if i still had my account i could tell you literally how many different jobs are running right now on polaris.
like do you have actual experience with gov/edu HPC? i doubt it because you couldn't be more wrong - lab HPC clusters are just very very poorly (relative to FAANG) strewn together nodes. there is absolutely no sense in which they are "one single machine" (nothing is "abstracted over" except NFS).
what you're saying is trivially false because no one ever requests all the machines at once (except when they're running linpack to produce top500 numbers). the rest of the time the workflow is exactly like in any industrial cluster: request some machines (through slurm), get those machines, run your job (hopefully you distributed the job across the nodes correctly), release those machines. if i still had my account i could tell you literally how many different jobs are running right now on polaris.