CoreTeks on youtube has a great video that explains the brilliance of this chip.
Good video indeed. Extra points for featuring Satoru Iwata!
Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
121–130 of 220 posts
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#122Can any of the HPC experts shed some light on how these ARM chips are better than their predecessors. I toured a small cluster in LANL, where the ARM chips ran the hottest and their cooling was the loudest.
I'm not sure what predecessors that means (ThunderX2?), but these have been carefully "co-designed" for the job with experience from K Computer. Actually that's for a set of job types, which is part of the point. They also have extensive capability for low precision, if you want that. Note that it's not just at the top of top500, which is relatively uninteresting, but wins, or is up there, on things like HPCG, some s…
TX2 is from a different company though (Cavium -> Marvell). I guess the "predecessor" of the A64FX would technically be some SPARC chip that Fujitsu used to build?
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#123I cannot think of any plausible way in which Apple could have influenced the date of this announcement, but the timing, given what is expected to be announced later today, is uncanny.
The chips in the supercomputer are not exactly ARM, they do have arm-8 instruction set but that's just for loading the proprietary vector extension unit.
Pretty much a GPU alike stuff with arm-8 set to be able to run its OS.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#124Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get ready for a surprise then: all those FLOPS are coming from the ARM cores.... This beast has no GPUs: https://postk-web.r-ccs.riken.jp/spec.html
It looks like this is not an ARM core, but a Fujitsu implementation of the Arm v8-A instruction set and Fujitsu-developed Scaleable Vector Extension. Most likely the latter is doing all the heavy lifting. https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-re... >A64FX is the world's first CPU to adopt the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), an extension of Armv8-A instruction set architecture for supercomputers.…
The text you linked to actually says that the SVE was developed cooperatively by Fujitsu and ARM, without, however, going into details about who did what.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#126We're living in an age in which AWS dwarfs all the machines on the TOP500 taken together. The TOP500 is a vestige of the cold war that needs to be retired. Similarly to how the US and the USSR used to compare their numbers of nuclear warheads, it is comparing a reserve of capacity that is probably going to be retired having brought marginal benefits at best, all in order to goad taxpayers into a futile competition.
What a complete load of nonsense. Do let us know what your AWS bills are like when you run your 100s of petaflops HPC job there. And what is the interconnect like? A few gigabit switches aren't the same as the interconnects on these supercomputers.
AWS isn't just a couple gigabit switches, they do offer some HPC-oriented things: https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/efa/
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#127Anyone know the reason for the dominance of Power processors in the top 10 other than it's from IBM and they get a lot of contracts for HPC?
The main reason is the partnership with nvidia. You get nvlink to the CPU, which you don't get on Intel/AMD (I believe). Other than that, I don't think there is a real competitive reason. The support and future timeline from IBM is lacking. I'm honestly surprised they are still big friends.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
yyyeah... no. A major part of what makes these machines special is their interconnect. Fujitsu is running a 6D torus interconnect with latencies well in the sub-usecond range. The special sauce is ability of cores to interact with each other with extreme bandwidth at extremely low latencies.
Thank you for this helpful info. For comparison's sake, say that you wanted to make babby's first super computer in your house with 2 laptops. That is to say, each laptop is a single core x86 system with its own motherboard and ram and ssd, and they are connected to each other in some way (ethernet? usb?) What software would one use to distribute some workload between these two nodes, what would the latency and bandw…
For software, I know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTCondor is used quite frequently in academia for distributed workloads.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#129Given that today's HPC architectures are mostly power constrained, and a majority of the FLOPS often come from GPUs (for their flop/watt ratios), this direction is not surprising. ARM has been making major strides in the high performance area. The new AWS Graviton processors are pretty nice from what I have heard. And then there's the ARM in Mac. Yup and Julia will run on all of these! While I say all of this, I shou…
I'll count myself as someone surprised, given that GPUs are often better tuned to HPC code, that Fujitsu was able to do so well with an Intel Phi approach of just using larger vector units on general purpose CPUs. I wouldn't have thought you could make an out of order core efficiently support scatter/gather the way this thing seems to, though I guess it's possible that the vector unit is in order. Well, the proof is in the pudding and hats off to Fujitsu and ARM.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#130The end of the US semiconductor industry is now in sight.
The only US owned state of the art fabs in the US belong to Intel. Intel survives because they have a high margin on x86 CPUs. Today, TMSC announced 5nm, and the top supercomputer is ARM-based.
Apple seems to be going ARM. Chromebooks are ARM. Microsoft now offers Windows on ARM, on the Surface Pro X. Mobile never used x86. x86 is on the way out. What's left for Intel?
(Micron is still a major force in DRAM, amazingly.)