21–30 of 115 posts
I wonder if we (United States ) could get a risc v in a supercomputer .
> SiPearl chose ARM as it is well-established and ready for high-performance applications. Experts say RISC-V is many years away from mainstream server adoption.
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?
* at least if they used pci-e
Interesting take on geography .
The confusion, pobably has to do with the fact that the German tier 0 Gauss super computing center is actually spread over 3 sites (Jülich near Cologne/Aachen, Stuttgart and Garching near Munich)
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…
"Since 2017, every system on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers has used Beowulf software methods and a Linux operating system."
As for accessible by everyone: here is how you can apply for computing time via PRACE, if you work at an academic institution, a commercial company or a government entity located in Europe:
https://prace-ri.eu/call/eurohpc-ju-call-for-proposals-for-r...
In addition to the very large machines that are covered by PRACE, typically there are national calls for access to "smaller" HPC resources, say up to a few million CPU-hours per year. The allocations on PRACE average around 30-40 million cpu-hours.
What is explicitly NOT allowed on these machines is typically running jobs that use just a handful of cores. They've paid a lot of money for the fancy interconnect, amd they want to see it used.
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?
Also note — this project is quite modest in scale. Dozens of GenAI clusters larger than this computer will be installed at cloud data centers in the next 18 months.
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?
The US Dept of Energy had very favorable things to say about the Fujitsu A64FX, which is architecturally similar to the SiPearl Rhea (HBM memory, ARM SVE happy, fast interconnect): https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1965278
They seemed to like the easy porting and flexible programming (since its "just" CPU SIMD) and specifically describe it as competitive with Nvidia:
> To highlight, the pink line represents the energy efficiency metric for A64FX in boost power mode (described in Section IV-C) with an estimated TDP of 140 W and surpassed by the red and yellow lines that represent data for the Volta V100 GPU (highest) and KNL, respectively. The A64FX architecture scores better with the energy efficiency metric relative to the performance efficiency metric due to its low power consumption.
In fact, ARM A64FX supercomputers topped the Green500 for some time, which is the global supercomputer power efficiency ranking, outclassing Nvidia/Intel/AMD machines.
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…
It already exists, there are probably >100 HPC clusters spread throughout the EU in universities + the CERN cluster etc.
> startups, SME's etc
Why would we want to provide resources for a startup to waste compute resources to optimise advertising clicks? They can spend their VC cash at aws.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16072/sipearl-lets-rhea-desig...
https://semiengineering.com/tag/sipearl/
...It may even be behind schedule?
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.