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Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

bbc.co.uk

141–150 of 179 posts

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#141
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the largest challenges in building an exascale cluster is communication. Computing power increases at a higher rate than memory throughput does, and memory throughput increases faster than communication infrastructure advances. Many argue that an exascale computer can only be cost efficient if the communication capabilities scale highly sublinearly with the computation done in the subsystems [1]. In particular…

You are incorrect saying MapReduce isn't locality aware. Hadoop supports machine, rack, row, and cluster locality scheduling. Also, most modern Internet HPC systems dedicate a ton of design and equipment to having very high cross-sectional bandwidth, which enables the locality restrictions to be relaxed.

Well my point exactly. That "ton of design and equipment" doesn't scale particularly well, as its cost grows highly super-linearly with the computing power. You need to reduce communication volume to be cost effective at exascale.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#142
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the people who run the clusters won't let you run any language just because it has an MPI binding. They invest a lot in ensuring peak performance, and right now, only C++ and FORTRAN can achieve that. Very few, if any, major supercomputer centers support Java codes.

Oh, you're talking about a policy limitation, not a technological one. (And if you're talking about the DOE or NSF/Teragrid/XSEDE clusters, then you're probably right. Haven't touched those in years -- and even when I did, I wasn't doing anything crazy.)

It is a technical limitation. Oftentimes the platform is so specialized that only a tiny handful of compilers are ported to it. Say, just gcc, g++, and gfortran, and xlc, xlC, and xlf. And just one version at that. Java would require porting the JVM to the cut-down, weird Linux on the compute nodes. Some $$$ machines don't even support dynamic linking! The number of these machines is so small that extensive compiler and tool support just isn't happening unless you want to add millions to the cost.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#143
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly designed to run AI for cyber-warfare / cyber-defense purposes? William Gibson's Black Ice coming to life?

More likely its for modeling nuclear weapons which I believe is the primary purpose of NSCI.

The story linked below about the French exascale plans explicitly states that it is the military applications division of the French nuclear energy agency (CEA) that is spearheading that effort. (I believe they work on both reactors and warheads.)

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#144
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha.. AWS?

Sure, I'm asking sincerely.

One of the issues faced in super computing isn't just raw horsepower or more cpu's, it's latency. It's not enough to just connect a ton of machines via ethernet, you need specialized hardware to provide high-throughput sharing of data.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#145
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'd say they're targeting around 60 megawatts, I can't imagine they'll get below that," [Mark Parsons] commented. "That's at least £60m a year just on your electricity bill."

I wouldn't trust a Brit to report the figures for the US Department of Energy. The DOE's budget is 20 Megawatts [source: http://science.energy.gov/~/media/ascr/ascac/pdf/meetings/20... ]

He didn't report it, he gave an estimate. And as for "wouldn't trust a Brit", I'd trust anyone directly involved in it, regardless of nationality.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#146
post #60
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

That seems to be more of a storage data centre. And if Wikipedia's figure of 60 megawatts is correct, it's well in the ballpark of a datacenter for Google or Facebook.

You may be interested in this facility: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprogram_Research_Facili...

Edit: also should say it is amusing to hear Obama talking about exascale conputing by 2025 when the NSA's goal (read the Wired article) is to get there by 2018.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#147
post #27

A bit more informative is the actual fact sheet put out by the white house [1]. What they are really aiming for is exa scale computing, which they define as being capable of applying exaFlops to exabytes. From my limited knowledge, the latter will actually be the bigger deal. As pointed out elsewhere, an exaflop supercomputer will probably come around beforehand. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/mic…

The real problem is getting 1 exaflop (or around it) within a reasonable power budget. The DOE's power budget for all of their supercomputing resources is 20 Megawatts, so at a full system level we would need to be at 50 GFLOPs per watt, while the best system right now is at 5.

Nvidia's Pascale GPU, due next year, is supposed to do 28 terraflops with 1300 watts which I make 21 GFLOPs per watt.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#148
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rather than tell us how much you hate the military and capitalism maybe you can figure out a better way. Well, knowing a few scientists, I can say that I know well the creative and inquiring spirits that advance us. The world is structured so that the people who do the actual development and discovery have to sell their talents to the logic of property and capital, either directly, or to the government that enforce…

There may be a better solution. Just because no one has found it doesn't mean we can't do better. However, I'm not one for cursing the darkness. Light a small candle and lead the way.

I think the solution is fewer solutions. When I am working well with others, there's nothing much to fuss about. When there are conflicts, it's not ideology or a system that wins the day. I think we two would collaborate just fine without such stuff, for instance. What works in conflict is the willingness to discard systems and ideas. Or, even better, the lack of willfulness to enforce systems and ideas in the first place.

Being conceptually slippery enough to get out of any problem comes naturally to skillful people in their fields. The situation at hand provides all the impetus for theory and practice there is. Conflict thrives off of superfluity: superfluous methods, superfluous justifications, and superfluous issues. Methodology and structure gets in the way of skillfulness.

I know that real human power scales on its own without armies and guns forcing it into a certain shape. People collaborate and collude very easily. People form groups very easily. People associate with people. It's probably the only culturally universal thing people do (well of course; culture only makes sense when there are associating people).

If we want association to work well, groups need to be able to disintegrate as easily as they come together. People need to be slippery, too. Without what makes groups cohere, they disintegrate on their own. When you see violence and hierarchy used to keep groups coherent, it means they've lost the essential power that makes them useful.

People like achieving status. Status is a social signal, and it communicates both ways. Status is not held like a title. Titles wax and wane in the status they confer just like every other human object and activity. When we pretend status can be held, that it can be concentrated and preserved, we get problems. If we let status come and go by its own logic, we'd have no problems with status. A society where status is maintained by a legal system will have hierarchies, and it will certainly have problems.

So ways that our current systems-- not just capitalism, fail: Labor is not free. Association is not free. Status is not free.

Even skillful people who believe in property as an organizing force wish to be locally free in these ways. Skillful people want to work unimpeded by the politics of labor, associating with likeminded people unimpeded by the politics of social groups, praised for the inherent virtue of their actions and unimpeded by the politics of status. They only believe in property because it helps them manage the world that is beyond their control, beyond the means of their skill. They use property to create a bubble in which they can live that is free from its control.

People who believe in property because they enjoy its logic, enjoy the wheeling and dealing, enjoy the frantic rush to get more of it, who feel more worthwhile the more property they have are nervous people, who can never be fulfilled, because property's logic does not lead to fullness, the only conclusion is 'not enough', the only purpose is 'more'.

I don't know how many people in the latter category actually exist. I suspect enough to cause a great deal of problems. In any case they require the assent of everyone else. I think all I have to say to everyone else is this:

The world without property is still full and whole, is still just, is still full of vitality, is still nourishing, and receptive to human power.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#149
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is getting 1 exaflop (or around it) within a reasonable power budget. The DOE's power budget for all of their supercomputing resources is 20 Megawatts, so at a full system level we would need to be at 50 GFLOPs per watt, while the best system right now is at 5.

Nvidia's Pascale GPU, due next year, is supposed to do 28 terraflops with 1300 watts which I make 21 GFLOPs per watt.

20+ GFLOPS/W for a single part isn't something new: http://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2012-08-27/processors-that-ca... (2012)

A huge amount of overall system power is spent in data transport. Plus, double everything for cooling. That brings the total system efficiency way down from what the actual computational components spend.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#150
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to read up on Sibyl.

The information I've seen about Sibyl (the Google ML system, not the genomics package ( http://sybil.sourceforge.net/documentation.html) ) says it is basically doing logistic regression using a parallel algorithm (Collins, Schapire, Singer) with a transpose on each iteration. Without knowing more about the problem sizes and data sparsity/irregularity, I expect the transpose to be a significant expense. I'd be happy t…

Both logistic regression and deep learning are basically just big conjugate gradient minimizers.

What I meant by asynchronous is that not all terms in a gradient are required to be summed in the same step.

The transpose step in Sibyl is implemented in the Shuffle and Reduce phases. The filesystem is used to hold the temporary data. Nevertheless even for large systems, very few steps are required, and step times are reasonable, even compared to modern supercomputers. This is a tribute primarily to the design of sibyl and the implementation of MapReduce at Google.

This is all explained in online versions of the Sibyl presentation. I really wish more people from DOE who write modern solvers would pay attention to this stuff.

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