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Colossus for Rapid Storage

cloud.google.com

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Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#23

Post by simonw »

Everyone needs to learn to use a single, unique, unambiguous URL for new product announcements like this.

Google aren't the only company that consistently mess this up, but given how they built a 1.95 trillion company on top of crawling URLs on the web they really should have an internal culture that values giving things unique URLs!

[I had to learn this lesson myself: I used to blog "weeknotes" every week or two where I'd bundle all of my project announcements together and it sucked not being able to link to them as individual posts]

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#24

Post by zifpanachr23 »

Reading the press release about the "Hypercomputer" and I can't tell what part of this is real and what part is marketing.

They say it comes in two configuration, 256 chips or 9,216 chips. They also say that the maximal configuration of 9,216 chips delivers 24x the compute power of the world's largest supercomputer (which they say is called El Capitan). They say that this comes to 42.6 exaFLOPs.

This implies that the 9,216 chip configuration doesn't actually exist in any form in reality, or else it would now be the world's largest supercomputer (by flops) by a huge margin.

Am I massively misunderstanding what the claims being made are about the TPU and the 42.6 exaFLOPs? I feel like this would be much bigger news if this was fully legit.

Edit: The flops being benchmarked are not the same as regular supercomputer flops.

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#25

Post by phonon »

zifpanachr23 wrote: post #24

Reading the press release about the "Hypercomputer" and I can't tell what part of this is real and what part is marketing. They say it comes in two configuration, 256 chips or 9,216 chips. They also say that the maximal configuration of 9,216 chips delivers 24x the compute power of the world's largest supercomputer (which they say is called El Capitan). They say that this comes to 42.6 exaFLOPs. This implies that the…

Supercomputers are measured based on 64 bit floating point operations. Here they (inaptly) compared it to their 8 bit floating point operations (which are only useful for AI workloads).

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#27

Post by zifpanachr23 »

phonon wrote: post #25
zifpanachr23 wrote: post #24

Reading the press release about the "Hypercomputer" and I can't tell what part of this is real and what part is marketing. They say it comes in two configuration, 256 chips or 9,216 chips. They also say that the maximal configuration of 9,216 chips delivers 24x the compute power of the world's largest supercomputer (which they say is called El Capitan). They say that this comes to 42.6 exaFLOPs. This implies that the…

Supercomputers are measured based on 64 bit floating point operations. Here they (inaptly) compared it to their 8 bit floating point operations (which are only useful for AI workloads).

Gotcha. That makes a lot more sense. I was led to believe by the wording of the comparison that they were the same operations. Appreciate the explanation.

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#28

Post by moandcompany »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #8
alobrah wrote: post #4

FYI this was unveiled at the 2025 Google Next conference, and they're apparently unveiling a gRPC client for Rapid Storage, which appears to be a very thin wrapper over Colossus itself, as this is just zonal storage.

Struggling to find a definition, but seemingly zonal just means there's a massive instance per cluster. Did find some interesting recent (March 28th, 2025) reads though! Colossus under the hood: How we deliver SSD performance at HDD prices https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer... I kind of thought you meant ZNS / https://zonedstorage.io/ at first, or it's more recent better awesomer counterpart…

"Zonal" relates to the concept of "availability zones" which are the next-smallest unit below a (physical) "region."

Most instances of a cloud ___ created in a region are allocated and exist at the zonal level (i.e. a specific zone of a region).

A physical "region" usually consists of three or more availability zones, and each zone is physically separated from other zones, limiting the potential for foreseeable disaster events from affecting multiple zones simultaneously. Zones are close enough networking-wise to have high throughput and low latency interconnection, but not as fast as same-rack, same-cluster communications.

Systems requiring high availability (or replication) generally attain this by placing instances (or replicas) in multiple availability zones.

Systems requiring high-availability generally start with multi-zone replication, and Systems with even higher availability requirements may use multi-region replication, which comes at greater cost.

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#29

Post by jeffbee »

alobrah wrote: post #4

FYI this was unveiled at the 2025 Google Next conference, and they're apparently unveiling a gRPC client for Rapid Storage, which appears to be a very thin wrapper over Colossus itself, as this is just zonal storage.

What on this page gives you that impression? Do I have to watch the 2-hour video to learn this?
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