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EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

hpcwire.com

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Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#11

Post by leetharris »

dopa42365 wrote: post #9

Isn't it mostly GPUs/accelerators based rather than CPUs? Does NVIDIA even sell those anymore without the whole package deal since they came up with Grace? The last supercomputer with NVIDIA GPUs and third party CPUs I remember reading about was with Zen 2 cores, multiple years ago.

The article says they are using SiPearl’s Rhea processor. So I'm guessing it's not a "package deal."

And regarding your question about GPU/accelerators, CPUs still do a LOT of work in HPC. I'm guessing they chose ARM for performance per watt, very important when scaling to many processors.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#12

Post by znpy »

As an european...

On one hand, it's nice to see funding to european companies to develop european technolgy, aiming at a technological sovereignty.

On the other hand, SiPearl looks like it was virtually unknown up to this point, and I can't seem to find anything looking like a cpu review (their website claims they have already released at least one generation of Rhea cpus). So this amount of money might not be wasted but still not optimally spent. Which isn't 100% bad, but at least bittersweet.

If anything, without reviews and performance benchmarks, we might just get ExaFLOPS on paper.

Like how does one of these Rhea CPUs compare to, say, a Graviton 2/3 or to an Ampere Altra cpu?

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#13

Post by jefft255 »

owlbite wrote: post #8

It seems odd to focus on the CPU here, when presumably the vast majority of those flops re coming from the NVIDIA parts? Are the CPUs expected to contribute significant compute, as opposed to marshaling data in/out of the real compute units?

Yes, CPUs are still the main workhorse for many scientific workloads. Sometimes just because the code hasn’t been ported, sometimes because it’s just not something that a GPU can do well.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#14

Post by cherryteastain »

znpy wrote: post #12

As an european... On one hand, it's nice to see funding to european companies to develop european technolgy, aiming at a technological sovereignty. On the other hand, SiPearl looks like it was virtually unknown up to this point, and I can't seem to find anything looking like a cpu review (their website claims they have already released at least one generation of Rhea cpus). So this amount of money might not be wasted…

There's only one way to promote domestic industries in this space when they are behind/nonexistent: tons of subsidies, even if the domestic alternatives are worse. That's how China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan did it.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#15

Post by nologic01 »

The economics (and politics) of the HPC ecosystem always feels a bit murky and its impact on the broader computing landscape not as much as you would expect. Expensive, one-of-a-kind designs that push the envelope (and pressumably deliver what they are commissioned for) but are floating somewhere above what the rest of the world is using.

What would a healthy EU HPC ecosystem look like? At some point there was some excitement about Beowulf clusters [1]. When building a new supercomputer, think, for example about making at least its main compute units more widely available (universities, startups, SME's etc). HPC Computing is arcane and to tap its potential in the post-Moore's law era it needs to get much more democratized and popular.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#17

Post by AdamN »

nologic01 wrote: post #15

The economics (and politics) of the HPC ecosystem always feels a bit murky and its impact on the broader computing landscape not as much as you would expect. Expensive, one-of-a-kind designs that push the envelope (and pressumably deliver what they are commissioned for) but are floating somewhere above what the rest of the world is using. What would a healthy EU HPC ecosystem look like? At some point there was some e…

There is also the benefit of all the people that get that experience and then bring it to trad-computing.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#18

Post by Someone »

nologic01 wrote: post #15

The economics (and politics) of the HPC ecosystem always feels a bit murky and its impact on the broader computing landscape not as much as you would expect. Expensive, one-of-a-kind designs that push the envelope (and pressumably deliver what they are commissioned for) but are floating somewhere above what the rest of the world is using. What would a healthy EU HPC ecosystem look like? At some point there was some e…

> making at least its main compute units more widely available

If they did, would anybody want them? Are those units competitive for smaller setups and the kind of jobs they run?

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#20

Post by brucethemoose2 »

znpy wrote: post #12

As an european... On one hand, it's nice to see funding to european companies to develop european technolgy, aiming at a technological sovereignty. On the other hand, SiPearl looks like it was virtually unknown up to this point, and I can't seem to find anything looking like a cpu review (their website claims they have already released at least one generation of Rhea cpus). So this amount of money might not be wasted…

Actually Rhea was "known" for awhile, but reading between the lines, looks like it got delayed and updated:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16072/sipearl-lets-rhea-desig...

(Neoverse V1 and HBM2e woild make this chip kinda old when its finally operational).

CPU design takes many years, and this was a HPC only chip, so it doesn't necessarily need to be marketed and paraded around, and the workloads will be totally different than what Graviton processors run.

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