41–50 of 115 posts
Can 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.
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...
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?
Agreed, the CPUs are not performing the scientific calculations in this system. 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.
>The Jülich Supercomputing Centre, which is near Munich, will host the system. 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)
This reads weird. It took me way too many seconds of wondering "wouldn't Stuttgart be nearer to... Stuttgart?" before I understood what you wrote. Sometimes the Oxford Comma has value, it seems.
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?
typically at least in the US there's a mix of GPU-focused machines as well as traditional CPU-focused machines. the leadership class machines (i.e., the machines funded to push the FLOPS records) tend to be highly focused on GPU. one reason is fixed cooling/power availability. I assume these facilities are looking at ARM as a way to save 10-20% on power and thus cram that much more into the facility.
I much rather have some investment into a advanced open-source RISC-V CPU and phones and laptops based on that. An Open hardware graphics accilerator would be great too. But if we are gone do a HPC thing, at least make the processor open-hardware and RISC-V.
Doubly so on the consumer side of things.
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?
Agreed, the CPUs are not performing the scientific calculations in this system. 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.
And
"Jülich is also building out its machine-learning and quantum computing infrastructure, which the supercomputing center hopes to plug in as accelerator modules hosted at its facility."
So a modular setup, where different aspects can be upgraded as needed. Btw:
> Also note — this project is quite modest in scale.
"Exascale" and €273M doesn't sound modest to me. No matter what it's compared against.
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?
Agreed, the CPUs are not performing the scientific calculations in this system. 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.
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...