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El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

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Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

#91

Post by robocat »

cameron_b wrote: post #63
balia wrote: post #42

Some may not want to hear this, but these “fastest supercomputer” list is now meaningless because all the Chinese labs have started obfuscating their progress. A while ago there were a few labs in China in top 10 and they all attracted sanctions / bad attention. Now no Chinese lab report any data now

They are in good company, with X, Meta, Microsoft and others not reporting theirs either. The basis for the ranking was a cumulative tracking of benchmark results that were required as part of commissioning bespoke computers. A contract would be written to buy a computer that could achieve a certain performance in operations per second, and in order to satisfy that the benchmarks were agreed to and codified in the co…

Folding-at-home reports theirs. 2020: "Folding@home project passes 2.4 ExaFLOPS, more than the top 500 supercomputers combined" https://www.techspot.com/news/84832-foldinghome-project-pass...

Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

#93

Post by glial »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #11
olao99 wrote: post #7

I fail to understand how these nuclear bomb simulations require so much compute power. Are they trying to model every single atom? Is this a case where the physicists in charge get away with programming the most inefficient models possible and then the administration simply replies "oh I guess we'll need a bigger supercomputer"

Pot, meet kettle? It's usually the industry that's leading with "write inefficient code, hardware is cheaper than dev time" approach. If anything, I'd expect a long-running physics research project to have well-optimized code. After all, that's where all the optimized math routines come from.

I bet the bulk of it is still super-fast Fortran code.

Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

#94

Post by mmoskal »

qingcharles wrote: post #74
cryptozeus wrote: post #12

This is great but I absolutely love that poster of el capitan on the supercomputer racks ! Also TIL there is a list of top500 at https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/

I've always loved these charts. The Numerical Wind Tunnel, #1 in 1993, achieved 124.2 gigaflops on the Linpack benchmark. In comparison, the iPhone 15 Pro Max cellphone, released in 2023, delivers approximately 2150 gigaflops. I once drew the chart backwards. I think my PC in 2013 would have been the fastest on Earth in 1990. And faster than every computer combined in about 1982.[0] [0] might not be accurate

2Tflops was #500 in 2006. Still a supercomputer. Crazy.

https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/

Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

#96

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

johnisgood wrote: post #89
sliken wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another fun fact, the priority for detecting nuclear testing led to seisometers all over the planet. So the detection the exact position and nature of any disturbance on the planet became radically better. This was quite the boon to anyone interested in earthquakes, not only can the earth quake be detected in 2D, but accurately in 3D. The number and accuracy is enough you can see where on each fault is, the thickness…

Cool factoids! If you have any more to share, please do so.

Not OP, but maybe he was referring to https://duckduckgo.com/secret+plane+supersonic+booms+nevada+... leading to https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-04-17-me-607-st... amongst others.

Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

#97

Post by adrian_b »

teleforce wrote: post #71

Fun facts, FFT was discovered back in 1965 based on the urgent necessity of discovering and detecting illegal nuke testing activities, just two years after the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) was signed in 1963 [1]. The first sentence statement in the article mentioning that United States and other nuclear powers committed to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1965 is wrong since the treaty was only signed i…

True, but like many modern inventions the discovery of FFT was a rediscovery.

Precursors of FFT have existed in various mathematical works, starting with Gauss, but such algorithms were neglected before the existence of automatic computers that could apply them to problems big enough for the dependence of the solving time on the size of the problem to matter.

Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

#98

Post by adrian_b »

qingcharles wrote: post #74
cryptozeus wrote: post #12

This is great but I absolutely love that poster of el capitan on the supercomputer racks ! Also TIL there is a list of top500 at https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/

I've always loved these charts. The Numerical Wind Tunnel, #1 in 1993, achieved 124.2 gigaflops on the Linpack benchmark. In comparison, the iPhone 15 Pro Max cellphone, released in 2023, delivers approximately 2150 gigaflops. I once drew the chart backwards. I think my PC in 2013 would have been the fastest on Earth in 1990. And faster than every computer combined in about 1982.[0] [0] might not be accurate

Those Gflop/s quoted for the iPhone must be FP32 Gflop/s.

The Gflop/s quoted in the past for supercomputers and now for big HPC clusters are FP64 Gflop/s.

The difference in cost between FP64 and FP32 is currently extremely high, much higher than it has ever been in the history of computer technology.

The reason is not technical, but of market segmentation, because NVIDIA, then also AMD, have removed the ability to do FP64 operations at a competitive rate from their "consumer" GPUs, so the best that one can get in performance per dollar is AMD 9950X (which can approach 2 FP64 Tflop/s per CPU, i.e. 256 FP64 FMA per clock cycle multiplied by around 4 GHz, with 2 flops per FMA).

Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

#100

Post by voxadam »

teleforce wrote: post #71

Fun facts, FFT was discovered back in 1965 based on the urgent necessity of discovering and detecting illegal nuke testing activities, just two years after the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) was signed in 1963 [1]. The first sentence statement in the article mentioning that United States and other nuclear powers committed to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1965 is wrong since the treaty was only signed i…

The Remarkable Story Behind The Most Important Algorithm Of All Time[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmgFG7PUHfo

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