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...
ARM is a UK company - the UK is (stupidly) not part of the EU
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EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
51–60 of 115 posts
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#52I 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...
ARM is a UK company - the UK is (stupidly) not part of the EU
I thought SoftBank bought them, making them a Japanese company?
In any case, SiPearl seems to be the one designing the actual chip, they are French.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#53I 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.
The libraries and compiler infrastructure are not ready. There is even some HPC optimization difficulty with ARM, which is much more mature. Doubly so on the consumer side of things.
Good oppertunity to get those things up to speed.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The libraries and compiler infrastructure are not ready. There is even some HPC optimization difficulty with ARM, which is much more mature. Doubly so on the consumer side of things.
Good oppertunity to get those things up to speed.
And that is happening right now.
RISC-V is coming, it just takes a long time.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
ARM is a UK company - the UK is (stupidly) not part of the EU
I thought SoftBank bought them, making them a Japanese company? In any case, SiPearl seems to be the one designing the actual chip, they are French.
Although SoftBank still owns 90% of the equity, they’re now back to being public and since their headquarters is still Cambridge, I’d still call them a UK company.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Jupiter will instead have SiPearl’s ARM processor based on ARM’s Neoverse V1 CPU design. SiPearl has designed the Rhea chip to be universally compliant with many accelerators, and it supports high-bandwidth memory and DDR5 memory channels." 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…
Almost all of the AI computers being built now are relatively modestly sized compared to a supercomputer. All but the biggest ones are at or under the low hundreds of nodes (low thousands of GPUs). The only real exceptions are the few AI hyperscale companies that want to sell GPU computing to others.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#57Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#58I 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...
ARM is a UK company - the UK is (stupidly) not part of the EU
They chose an ARM CPU by SiPearl. The European Processor Initiative (EPI) lists them as French/German. Interestingly Forschungszentrum Jülich (which this supercomputer is for) is also listed as member of EPI.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 demand compute time within the existing users far outstrips the supply, by orders of magnitude, hence why more is being installed.
Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
#60Can 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.
They used to do nuclear physics research (and still do to some extend) there and had an experimental fast breeder reactor (capable of producing weapons grade plutonium) on campus. They also prepared for rapid development of nuclear weapons capabilities in the 60s. It was a site for a potential German nuclear weapons program, I think they would have been able to produce enough material in ~6 weeks. They frame it as "nuclear disarmament" now of course https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/press-release/2022..., but effectively if there is any place where scientists in Germany have active knowledge how to develop nuclear weapons it would be there. There are several former military installations close by, including barracks for a guards and supply company.
You don't want something like that in a city centre.