I get the impression this is more subsidizing domestic development
than a decision made for the overall "best" CPU.
https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/sipearl-raises-e90m-for-rhea...
EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#32SiPearl didn't come out of the blue. This has been in planning for years: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16072/sipearl-lets-rhea-desig... https://semiengineering.com/tag/sipearl/ ...It may even be behind schedule?
Interesting thing is that they do not have a Wikipedia entry. It seems purely a product of JU / European Processor Initiative. If this works it would be one of the few real successes of the European funding framework.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#33The 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?
it would depend heavily on costs and tangible benefits versus e.g., renting something from cloud providers. its a new vista, its anybody's guess how things will look in five years, but when Intel's CEO is touting the era of the "AI PC" [1] their projection must be that a certain market will form around compute intensive local computing (largely prompted by the popularity of LLM/AI but that just one domain).
on the second branch of your question, indeed a local "supercomputer piece" should have a sufficient number of CPU/GPU's to pack meaningful computational power. this way it would also require and enable the right kind of tooling and programming that scales to larger sizes.
given that algorithms can enhance practically any existing application (productivity, games etc), this might be a case of "build it and they will come"
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/intel-ceo-get-ready-for-the-ai-pc
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#34Can report Jülich is not near Munich.... Anyway will be fascinating to see how the SiPearl chip works out.
Yea, much closer to Aachen in NRW. Side note, it's a small town without campus, I wonder why dont they locate the center in Aachen or Koln.
My vague memory is that there was/is a military or government site nearby which is why the research centre is also there.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#35SiPearl didn't come out of the blue. This has been in planning for years: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16072/sipearl-lets-rhea-desig... https://semiengineering.com/tag/sipearl/ ...It may even be behind schedule?
Interesting thing is that they do not have a Wikipedia entry. It seems purely a product of JU / European Processor Initiative. If this works it would be one of the few real successes of the European funding framework.
Many interesting chips escape Wikipedia's gaze. For instance, there was a very interesting x86, Zen-like CPU from Centaur with an onboard AI accelerator that is basically undocumented on Wikipedia:
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3256/centaur-new-x86-server-p...
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3099/centaur-unveils-its-new-...
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#36The 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…
> What would a healthy EU HPC ecosystem look like? 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.
you (or rather the tax payer that pays your salary) would not "provide" anything. the concept is for non-government money sponsored entities to get access (by buying) substantially similar (but scaled down) architectures instead of spending their VC cash at aws.
ultimately this is also better use of taxpayer money: diffusing technology more wider and educating people to make use of supercomputing technologies beyond the ivory towers
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#37The 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…
Direct quote from your link: "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-proposal…
Remote "cloud" style access is also interesting and important for various use-cases. But I was thinking more in terms of local compute capabilities. I.e. somebody actually packaging these new compute units into workstations / servers to be used by diverse entities.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#38As 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…
They are using the ARM Neoverse V1 platform, so they aren't really greenfielding this. Comparatively the Altra uses the Neoverse N1 platform, which is an older HPC design. The supercomputer is planned to be very GPU heavy, so while the CPUs offer SVE they really are primarily orchestrators to the GPU and wouldn't be a major factor regardless. They're the duct tape.
Like many vendors in the ARM space, most of the real innovation and design comes from ARM.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#39It 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?
You'd be surprised. A lot of supercomputers aren't that much about individual CPU core perf, but having a lot of low power cores connected in a novel way. The BlueGene supercomputers were composed of low spec PowerPC cores (even for the time).
High perf/watt matter more than just high perf/node, but even that balanced against 'how low latency can the interconnect be'.
You then hit the high FLOP count with tons of nodes.
To be fair Nvidia realized this paradigm years ago too, which is why they bought Mellanox.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#40If they only spent half the budget then is the Nvidia part still to come?