151–160 of 172 posts
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...
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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
They are used to do large-scale high-resolution analysis or simulation of complex systems in the physical world. The codes typically run on the bare metal with careful control of resource affinity, often C++ these days. They aren't just used for global-scale geophysical processes like weather and climate or complex physics simulations. For example, oil companies rent time to analytically reconstruct the 3-dimensional…
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…
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They are used to do large-scale high-resolution analysis or simulation of complex systems in the physical world. The codes typically run on the bare metal with careful control of resource affinity, often C++ these days. They aren't just used for global-scale geophysical processes like weather and climate or complex physics simulations. For example, oil companies rent time to analytically reconstruct the 3-dimensional…
What do you mean bare metal? Because all of the big DOE computers are running Linux. Users will probably use hardware specific libraries (like CUDA/ROCm) and occasionally write some hardware specific asm, but none of the big computers are running without a POSIX OS.
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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?
Although keep in mind they have a lot of momentum that is going largely in the right way to begin with. They have among the best logic designers, circuit designers, EDA, silicon research and manufacturing process and technologies, and software division in the world. Despite Intel having had a > 5 year train wreck in their 10nm manufacturing technology, they're able to release CPUs which are for many cases among the best if not the best in the market which goes to show how far ahead they were and how good their design capability still is.
So I think the problem is both bigger and smaller than people think (i.e., they've not completely crashed and burned, but it won't be a matter of just wiping the slate clean and ordering the engineers to deliver on the next product).
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> 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.
Does this No. 1 position have something to do with the ban on exporting advanced technology to China?
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> (..) 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.
The money pouring into research disproves this.
In fact, it makes no sense at all to clam that our collective understanding of a phenomenon is already satisfactory and all research was already done after a few years of the first real world test.
For context, the Oklahoma City bombing was a few decades into the past but it still motivates a great deal of research in multiple research paths, even though none of it is rocket science or involves cutting-edge physics.
China has two exaflop supercomputers. It's doubtful whether this is the world's most powerful supercomputer. https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/10/26/china-has-already-re...
I'm not really sure why you would trust this claim from China. Its not impossible, but its also not impossible to lie about
Why not? While I don't remember what was the previous US's x86 cluster that ranked as top of Top500 List (RoadRunner in 2009?), China's Tianhe-3 and OceanLight are direct successors of Tianhe-2A and TaihuLight, which are once fastest and still in top 10. These seems more promising to me.