I believe it all comes down to cost. I've seen some calculations on reddit that were like 30k USD for the compute needed on Amazon ( absolutely no idea what the task was, something with GPUs). So that's obviously not possible for many people. What's the price for a supercomputer compared to that? I imagine it may be free for students? In my university you can gain access to serious hardware ( I'm talking powerful servers, not comparable to a supercomputer) by just asking around. What is it like in bigger universities?