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AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

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Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#121

Post by adrian_b »

Const-me wrote: post #90
adrian_b wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides being the first system exceeding the 1 Exaflop/s threshold, what is more impressive is that this is also the system with the highest ratio between computational speed and power consumption (i.e. the AMD devices have the first place in both Top500 and Green500). The AMD GPUs with the CDNA ISA have surpassed in energy efficiency both the NVIDIA A100 GPUs and the Fujitsu ARM with SVE CPUs, which had been the bes…

> The former are useless for DP computations Looking at “double-precision GFlops” columns there [1] they don’t seem terribly bad, more than twice as fast compared to similar nVidia chips [2] While specialized extremely expensive GPUs from both vendors are way faster with many TFlops of FP64 compute throughput, I wouldn’t call high-end consumer GPUs useless for FP64 workloads. The compute speed is not terribly bad, an…

"Useless" means that both DP Gflops/s/W and DP Gflops/s/$ are worse for the modern AMD and NVIDIA gaming GPUs, than for many CPUs, so the latter are a better choice for such computations.

The opposite relationship between many AMD GPUs and the available CPUs was true until 5-6 years ago, while NVIDIA had reduced the DP computation abilities of their non-datacenter GPUs many years before AMD, despite their previous aggressive claims about GPGPU being the future of computation, which eventually proved to be true only for companies and governments with exceedingly deep pockets.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#123

Post by belter »

chrisseaton wrote: post #59
belter wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial argument since the beginning of this thread, is that it's the most powerful computer not the fastest, as it will not be, for the case for some single threaded task. Not really sure what is so controversial about it...:-)

> as it will not be, for the case for some single threaded task Nobody but you is confused about this.

It's not confusion, is about clarifying that "fast" is contextual...

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#124

Post by ghc »

zepmck wrote: post #106

The most powerful and unfortunately unusable supercomputer of the world. AMD's approach to GPUs is on a failing track since its inception. The only software stack available is super fragile, buggy and barely supported. Rather than building a HPL machine I would have preferred see public money spent in a different way.

It's a supercomputer. The programming model is very, very different. The software stack is full of incredibly fragile stuff from any number of manufacturers. It's honestly hard to even describe how much more difficult using MPI with Fortran on a supercomputer is compared to anything I've ever touched elsewhere. Maybe factory automation comes close?

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#125

Post by convolvatron »

gibolt wrote: post #82
jcranmer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The national labs aren't purely--or likely even mostly--dedicated to nuclear research. Instead, they cover a lot of the basic science research. These supercomputers will likely be used for projects like exploring cosmological models, or studying intramolecular interactions for chemical compounds, or fine-tuning predictions about properties of the top quark, etc.

Because these are so linked to research, everyone and their cousin is vying for time on them. Even though it may be massive, no individual will get anywhere near peak.

usually on the DOE machines some time is reserved for 'hero runs', but its generally only the classified stockpile work that qualifies

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#126

Post by ghc »

curiousgal wrote: post #93

How much of that performance will get undone by the software though? Either through AMD's lack of effort or Intel's compiler "sabotage".

It probably won't be a factor. The likelihood of the system using standard compilers or drivers is quite low. It's non-trivial to optimize a compiler and drivers for a supercomputer, so companies like Cray make their own.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#128

Post by convolvatron »

irfn wrote: post #79
briffle wrote: post #71

What blows my mind is the newest NOAA super computer (that triples the speed of the last one) is a whopping 12 petaflops. It comes online this summer. It kind of shows the difference in priority spending, when nuclear labs get >1000 petaflop super computers, and the weather service (that helps with disasters that affect many Americans each year) gets a new one that is 1.2% of the speed. https://www.noaa.gov/media-rel…

I am curious as to what class of problems are being solved on these super computers. Also whats the abstraction of computation here. Is it a container :-t :-t :-t

no, its a gang scheduled process - at least that's been the standard model. those processes are run either close to bare metal or as a process on linux. containers would be useful to package up the shared dependencies, so that may have changed.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#129

Post by allie1 »

interesting_pt wrote: post #66
scardycat wrote: post #32

Congratulations to AMD, HPE and ORNL! This is an amazing achievement. Can't wait to see the spectacular science results coming from this installation. Intel was supposed to build the first Exascale system for ANL [1] [2]. to be installed by 2018. They completely and utterly messed up the execution, partly drive by 10nm failure, went back to the drawing board multiple times, and now Raja switched the whole thing to GP…

I worked at Intel in a very closely related area. I quit after getting vaccinated for COVID, only stayed because of the pandemic. The biggest problem was that Intel simply couldn't execute. They couldn't design and manufacture hardware in a timely manner without too many bugs. I think this was due to poor management practices. My direct manager was amazing, but my skiplevel was always dealing with fires. It felt like…

I’ve been reading about Pat Gelsinger turning things around on execution, but many of the announced products for this year are already late (Sapphire Rapids, GPUs, even alder lake roll out was late).

Do you know if anything has changed at Intel? Is it reasonable to expect changes within a year and a half of starting on the job given the size of the company and the changes needed?

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#130

Post by Const-me »

adrian_b wrote: post #121
Const-me wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The former are useless for DP computations Looking at “double-precision GFlops” columns there [1] they don’t seem terribly bad, more than twice as fast compared to similar nVidia chips [2] While specialized extremely expensive GPUs from both vendors are way faster with many TFlops of FP64 compute throughput, I wouldn’t call high-end consumer GPUs useless for FP64 workloads. The compute speed is not terribly bad, an…

"Useless" means that both DP Gflops/s/W and DP Gflops/s/$ are worse for the modern AMD and NVIDIA gaming GPUs, than for many CPUs, so the latter are a better choice for such computations. The opposite relationship between many AMD GPUs and the available CPUs was true until 5-6 years ago, while NVIDIA had reduced the DP computation abilities of their non-datacenter GPUs many years before AMD, despite their previous ag…

My desktop PC has Ryzen 7 5700G, on paper it can do 486 GFlops FP64 (8 cores at 3.8 GHz base frequency, two 4-wide FMAs every cycle). However, that would require 2TB/sec memory bandwidth, while the actual figure is 51 GB/second of that bandwidth. For large computational tasks where the source data doesn’t fit in caches, the CPU can only achieve a small fraction of the theoretical peak performance ‘coz bottlenecked by memory.

The memory in graphics cards is an order of magnitude faster, my current one has 480 GB/sec of that bandwidth. For this reason, even gaming GPUs can be much faster than CPUs on some workloads, despite the theoretical peak FP64 GFlops number is about the same.

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