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EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

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Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#61

Post by znpy »

cherryteastain wrote: post #14
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.

yeah i understand that, hence the first point.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#62

Post by chasil »

datameta wrote: post #22

A bit sad that while POWER9 processors were used in then-SoTA supercomputers, as far as I can tell POWER10 (which I worked on more) is not being used for scientific/industrial HPC.

I understand that POWER9 was much more open than its successor. Is that a factor?

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#63

Post by pjmlp »

bigdave42 wrote: post #50
ThinkBeat wrote: post #31

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

It is still closer to us than depending on US technology, as times are proving globalization has gone too far.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#64

Post by bee_rider »

sgerenser wrote: post #55
bee_rider wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s probably fair, I was just teasing.

In general, I think ARM just was famously started in the UK and so they’ll always be associated with the country in some intangible way.

It is sort of funny that we label companies like this, really they are all multi-national entities. Especially in the case of a company like ARM—they license out the designs to be (sometimes quite significantly!) customized by engineers in other countries, and I’m sure they integrate lots of feedback from those partners. Then those designs are often actually fabricated in a third country!

Which is good, the world is best when we all need each other.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#65

Post by bee_rider »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #56
RetroTechie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Do AI hyperscalers devote a their whole system to one big run anyway?

If they don’t, then those are big clusters in the sense that AWS is the world’s biggest supercomputer, which is to say, not.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#66

Post by xadhominemx »

RetroTechie wrote: post #48
xadhominemx wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

At €300m, the Jupiter will be ~10,000 H100s. Each major CSP will have several clusters this size or larger within a few quarters.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#67

Post by devnullbrain »

bee_rider wrote: post #52
bigdave42 wrote: post #50

Earlier 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.

>I thought SoftBank bought them, making them a Japanese company?

What a weird metric for determining the nationality of a company. Intel are publicly traded: are they stateless?

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#68

Post by the_svd_doctor »

bee_rider wrote: post #49
xadhominemx wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Will these GenAI clusters have similar interconnects and ability to run scientific computing/HPC codes? AI has moved over to ASICS and GPUs nowadays, right? I also have no idea what their interconnect requirements are, but the task seems pretty low communication, I wonder if they can get by with a cheaper interconnect.

AI training requires a lot of global reductions which must be very fast otherwise everything slows down. So they also require fast and low latency interconnects.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#69

Post by my123 »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #35
riedel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

At this point, Centaur pretty much no longer exists, with engineers transferred to Intel. CNS never ended up becoming a product.

Re: EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer

#70

Post by londons_explore »

jefft255 wrote: post #13
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.

> just because the code hasn’t been ported,

Seems stupid to use millions of dollars of supercomputer time just because you can't be bothered to get a few phd students to spend a few months rewriting in CUDA...

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