First true exascale supercomputer?
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First true exascale supercomputer?
1–10 of 72 posts
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#2It feels like it's been a long time since supercomputers were interesting. They're just oodles of identical processors connected together like legos. "We can afford more bricks than the next guy" is not exciting. When was the last time we had a "fastest supercomputer" that could do something the second-fastest couldn't also do?
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#3> and relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.
This seems suprising to me, I would have expected 10Gb at least, if not something like inifiniband.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#4Back in the 2010 timeframe, there were articles about how an Exascale Supercomputers might be impossible. Would be interesting if someone could go back and assess where those predictions were wrong and where they held, and how the architecture changed to get around those true scaling limits.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#5Back in the 2010 timeframe, there were articles about how an Exascale Supercomputers might be impossible. Would be interesting if someone could go back and assess where those predictions were wrong and where they held, and how the architecture changed to get around those true scaling limits.
Power efficiency mostly. The power requirements of an exascale machine with 2010-timeframe hardware would be crazy.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#6The spec sheet mentions they're moving from CUDA powering their prior supercomputer to "HIP" for this one. This is the first I've heard of HIP, does anyone have experience with it? My impression was that GPU programming tended to mean CUDA, which isn't cross platform (as opposed to HIP).
https://developer.amd.com/resources/rocm-learning-center/fun....
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#7I used to be really excited about supercomputers. It's part of why I pursued HPC-related work.
But I think that having no interest in their actual applications has curbed my enthusiasm. I wish I could make a good living in something that interested more.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#8> and relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer. This seems suprising to me, I would have expected 10Gb at least, if not something like inifiniband.
It's wrong, and quite a funny typo. The interconnect is 100 gigabit.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#9> and relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer. This seems suprising to me, I would have expected 10Gb at least, if not something like inifiniband.
That's a typo, Frontier uses the Slingshot network from Cray/HPE. The table below has the correct information.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#10> 8,730,112 total cores
This must include the GPUs, otherwise it'd be 136,408 sockets. For a 42U rack with 4P 1U servers (not that that's what's in use, but to give an understandable napkin figure), that'd be 812 racks.
Frontier's own page says 74 "cabinets"/racks, and this is just for the compute (and perhaps switching and/or power? storage is elsewhere). Made up of 9408 nodes, with 4 MI250X gpu accelerators each- those accelerators being dual chip + 8x HBMe2 memory a piece monsters. From Anandtech[1], we can see the liquid-cooled half-width sleds are dual socket, and packed packed packed.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17074/amds-instinct-mi250x-re...