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AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

tomshardware.com

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Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#141

Post by gigatexal »

edm0nd wrote: post #137
gigatexal wrote: post #136

I am still kicking myself every time I look at AMD’s share price. I sold a not-insignificant-to-me amount of shares when the price was basically below 10 a share. Now it’s above 100. All this is to say that the turn around at AMD is good to see and the missteps at Intel are hilarious. This is like the time the Athlon64 and it’s on die memory controller was kicking the Pentiums around.

Now would be a pretty decent time to buy back in if you still wanna go long on AMD again.

I did a few weeks ago. It’s the only thing other than Nvidia that is up in my portfolio right now, lol.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#142

Post by Const-me »

adrian_b wrote: post #138
Const-me wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are right that there are problems whose solving speed is limited by the memory bandwidth, and for such problems GPUs may be better than CPUs. Nevertheless, many of the problems of this kind require more memory than the 8 GB or 16 GB that are available on cheap GPUs, so the CPUs remain better for those. On the other hand, there are a lot of problems whose time-consuming part can be reduced to multiplications of de…

I guess I was lucky with the CAM/CAE software I’m working on. We don’t have too many GB of data, the stuff fits in VRAM of inexpensive consumer cards.

One typical problem is multiplying dense vector by a sparse matrix. Unlike multiplication of two dense matrices, I don’t think it’s possible to decompose into manageable pieces which would fit into caches to saturate the FP64 math of the CPU cores.

We have tested our software on nVidia Teslas in a cloud (the expensive ones with many theoretical TFlops of FP64 compute), the performance wasn’t too impressive.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#143

Post by jsmith99 »

Twirrim wrote: post #80
mulmen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a faster computer improve outcomes for victims of natural disaster? How much is left undiscovered about weather? Research spending is based on the potential for discovery. As a species we have studied weather since the beginning of time. How long have we been doing nuclear research? A century? Is there even an opportunity cost here? Or is it an economy of scale? As we build more supercomputers the costs go down…

> Would a faster computer improve outcomes for victims of natural disaster? How much is left undiscovered about weather? The US is way behind on weather modelling, in part due to lack of computing power available to do the grids at sufficiently small cells compared to Europe and other parts of the world. That means less accurate predictions and less advance notice of impending disasters, which means more risk of loss…

For comparison, the UK government Met Office installed a similar sized cluster of Cray XC40 machines about 6 years ago, with a 60 petaflop replacement arriving this year. Their forecasts are, anecdotally, locally considered a bit rubbish though.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#144

Post by claforte »

torrance wrote: post #11
uniqueuid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So what is your workflow right now?

Develop against CUDA locally. Port my kernels to ROCm, and occupy a whole HPC node for debugging and performance tuning for a week. It’s terrible. Edit: I should say that their recommendation is to write the kernels in ‘hip’ which is supposed to be their cross device wrapper for both cuda or ROCm. I’m writing in Julia however so that’s not possible.

The AMD software stack has been behind for a long time but I feel like we're finally catching up. I heard that HIP (and hopefully the rest of ROCM) is now supported on the RX6800XT consumer GPU... maybe that could help? BTW my team at AMD has been using Julia for ML workloads for a while. We should get in touch - maybe some of the lessons we learn can be useful to you. My email is claforte. The domain I'm sure you can guess. ;-)

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#145

Post by vchuravy »

torrance wrote: post #11
uniqueuid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So what is your workflow right now?

Develop against CUDA locally. Port my kernels to ROCm, and occupy a whole HPC node for debugging and performance tuning for a week. It’s terrible. Edit: I should say that their recommendation is to write the kernels in ‘hip’ which is supposed to be their cross device wrapper for both cuda or ROCm. I’m writing in Julia however so that’s not possible.

If you are using Julia I would recommend looking at AMDGPU.jl and (pluging my own project here) KernelAbstractions.jl

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#146

Post by claforte »

torrance wrote: post #11
uniqueuid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So what is your workflow right now?

Develop against CUDA locally. Port my kernels to ROCm, and occupy a whole HPC node for debugging and performance tuning for a week. It’s terrible. Edit: I should say that their recommendation is to write the kernels in ‘hip’ which is supposed to be their cross device wrapper for both cuda or ROCm. I’m writing in Julia however so that’s not possible.

BTW have you tried `KernelAbstractions.jl`? With it you can write code once that will run reasonably fast on AMD or NVIDIA GPUs or even on CPU. One of our engineers just started using it and is pleased with it - apparently the performance is nearly equivalent to native CUDA.jl or AMDGPU.jl, and the code is simpler.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#147

Post by wait_a_minute »

ghc wrote: post #124
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?

How could someone get practical experience in this space?

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#148

Post by mrb »

dang wrote: post #65

This reads more or less like a corporate press release - (edit: actually, it reads exactly like a corporate press release) - is there a more substantive article on the topic?

I like this one, it gets into the specifics of the hardware, specifically the 7 slides in the middle of the article: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-powered-frontier-super...

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#149

Post by ok_dad »

arinlen wrote: post #98
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…

> (..) when nuclear labs get >1000 petaflop super computers (..) Would you prefer the research being performed based on empirical testing instead of running simulations?

IMO: we had good enough nuclear weapons 50 years ago to glass the whole planet, so why continue to try and improve a weapon of armageddon? Just maintain and build the same old nuclear weapons that are effective enough and try and remove the need for the weapons over time with the diplomatic and political process.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#150

Post by [deleted] »

ok_dad wrote: post #149
arinlen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (..) when nuclear labs get >1000 petaflop super computers (..) Would you prefer the research being performed based on empirical testing instead of running simulations?

IMO: we had good enough nuclear weapons 50 years ago to glass the whole planet, so why continue to try and improve a weapon of armageddon? Just maintain and build the same old nuclear weapons that are effective enough and try and remove the need for the weapons over time with the diplomatic and political process.

[deleted]
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