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Berkeley Lab Debuts Perlmutter, World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer

hpcwire.com

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Re: Berkeley Lab Debuts Perlmutter, World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer

#11

Post by jnsie »

xiii1408 wrote: post #8
Zenst wrote: post #2

What would be the first question you would ask an AI supercomputer? Myself: What does 42 mean?

Dude it's just a bunch of GPUs with a fast network... Source: Berkeley PhD student in supercomputing, have access to Perlmutter.

Be honest. Has anyone used it to mine crypto yet?

Re: Berkeley Lab Debuts Perlmutter, World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer

#13

Post by reikonomusha »

I wish I could try running the DQVM, the distributed quantum simulator written in Common Lisp [0], on this thing. It would be awesome to show that Lisp is a viable “peta-scale” language.

[0] https://github.com/quil-lang/qvm/tree/master/dqvm

Re: Berkeley Lab Debuts Perlmutter, World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer

#14

Post by stonogo »

jeffbee wrote: post #12

How do we know this is the largest ML facility in the field? Can anybody rule out the idea that I could go to GCP right now and launch 1500 nodes with 4 GPUs each?

Do it! You'll make the news, and then fifteen minutes later NERSC will still be the largest ML facility in the field. The HPC community is accustomed to stunt machines, and accustomed to disregarding the ones that don't wind up enabling meaningful research.

Re: Berkeley Lab Debuts Perlmutter, World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer

#16

Post by jeffbee »

stonogo wrote: post #14
jeffbee wrote: post #12

How do we know this is the largest ML facility in the field? Can anybody rule out the idea that I could go to GCP right now and launch 1500 nodes with 4 GPUs each?

Do it! You'll make the news, and then fifteen minutes later NERSC will still be the largest ML facility in the field. The HPC community is accustomed to stunt machines, and accustomed to disregarding the ones that don't wind up enabling meaningful research.

That wasn't really much of a quantitative argument. Tons of meaningful research has been done in clouds. Granted, it was often by the owner of the cloud, but there it is. So is there anything we can compare? Does it train resnet-50 in a split second or what?

Re: Berkeley Lab Debuts Perlmutter, World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer

#17

Post by ArtWomb »

mooneater wrote: post #6

Not just for perl! > namesake of Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to research showing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating

Aptly named, as the first simulations will be detecting dark matter. What's incredible is that optical simulation in high energy physics can be reduced to ray tracing in computer graphics. Photon generation and propagation directly mapping to NVidia's OptiX framework ;)

Opticks : GPU Optical Photon Simulation for Particle Physics using NVIDIAR OptiX

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/898/4/0...

Projected sensitivities of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment to new physics via low-energy electron recoils

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11740

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