> "This HPE Cray EX system is the first US system with a peak performance exceeding one ExaFlop/s."
So, it's not actually the first one? And another one already exists outside the US?
First true exascale supercomputer?
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Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#12> 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.
seems to be a proprietary interconnect that is “Ethernet compatible”
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/hpc/slingshot-interconnect...
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#13It 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?
Speed is just the measure of how fast it does something not a measure of what it's capable of doing. I wouldn't expect to divine more information like "what new things can it do" from that number alone outside "things we didn't have enough compute time for before we do now".
Lego style supercomputers are still very interesting in my eye though. As the technical complexity involved in scaling the raw compute performance has simplified to a "how many do you want" problem the technical complexity in the interconnects has remained interesting and innovative both for connectivity intra and inter node. You won't really see that in the FLOPS number that makes the headlines but the interconnect can be the difference between a type of workload being feasible or not. The main push here is how large you can make certain levels of shared memory access happen at what latencies to run larger jobs instead of just more jobs.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#14> "This HPE Cray EX system is the first US system with a peak performance exceeding one ExaFlop/s." So, it's not actually the first one? And another one already exists outside the US?
Yes. It is assumed that China is downplaying how capable theirs are.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#1521 MW power! Insane.
Interestingly, the second one is 30 MW.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#16There's a bit of drama in that there are unofficial reports of two systems in China with higher performance [0], the arXiv paper listed below talks about a 40 million core system with around double theoretical performance than Frontier, and there's apparently a second system online with similar performance. I personally suspect that they didn't submit benchmarks to the top500 simply because those don't run well enough in the systems
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#17> "This HPE Cray EX system is the first US system with a peak performance exceeding one ExaFlop/s." So, it's not actually the first one? And another one already exists outside the US?
That was an odd qualification. The only thing they mention is that the #2 computer in Japan is theoretically capable of an Exaflop, but hasn’t demonstrated it yet.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#18There's a bit of drama in that there are unofficial reports of two systems in China with higher performance [0], the arXiv paper listed below talks about a 40 million core system with around double theoretical performance than Frontier, and there's apparently a second system online with similar performance. I personally suspect that they didn't submit benchmarks to the top500 simply because those don't run well enoug…
I heard they won’t submit anymore so as to not draw further scrutiny and possible sanctions onto their suppliers. Not sure if true, but keeping a low profile certainly makes sense given the blows dealt to the more visible vendors in the past few years.
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#19The 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... .
HIP is basically CUDA with s/cuda/hip/g.
My experience is that the stack is pretty rough around the edges. But when it works, you (almost) literally find-and-replace, and it pretty much works as advertised. However, just because you can get to a correct code doesn't necessarily mean that code will achieve optimal performance (without further tuning, of course).
Re: First true exascale supercomputer?
#20The 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... .
If you have AMD gpus, then you need to use HIP to run all those CUDA applications.