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Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

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Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#161

Post by leeter »

gnufx wrote: post #87
leeter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So looking at anandtech's breakdown the CPUs are closer to a knights landing 'CPU/GPU' than a traditional CPU (currently). They also have a ton of HBM2 right next to the dies so this should be insanely fast as they can feed those cores very very quickly regardless of how fast each core is by clock and pipeline. That should massively reduce stalls.

As an early user of KNL, I don't get the "GPU" bit. KNL runs normal x86_64 code and doesn't look that much different to the AMD Interlagos systems I once used apart from the memory architecture.

It comes from the fact that KNL came from Larrabee which was actually developed as a GPU initially (and even ran games... sort of) but was never actually released. The next revision of that was the Xeon Phi chips you used. So the connection is "Lots of small cores with lots of high bandwidth ram" although these cores are definitely superscalar where Larrabee and derivatives were not really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#162

Post by krapht »

timthorn wrote: post #103
loudmax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No kidding! I don't have any sense of how much these cost to manufacture. There ought to be a market for a A64fx based rackmount server system. If the price isn't outrageous, I'd love to see these sold as an SBC.

Something like the Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX700?

Minimum 128 unit purchase for those outside Japan, though.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#163

Post by sitharus »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #158
Animats wrote: post #130

The 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 f…

You see Intel is a 50 yr old company, you think they will sit hand in hand on their bums? If the majority Industry shifts towards ARM ISA Intel will evolve, What stops Intel from Licensing the ARM Core and build a industry leading ARM Chip? I think no-one with the exception of Apple in the semiconductor industry has more resources than Intel to build a world class ARM CPU. Intel is just trying to drag x86 as far as p…

Intel already license the ARM core IP and used to build their own ARM chips under the XScale brand. They sold the line off in 2007 IIRC but retained the ARM architectural license.

The only thing that stops them is their will to do it.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#164

Post by Animats »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #158
Animats wrote: post #130

The 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 f…

You see Intel is a 50 yr old company, you think they will sit hand in hand on their bums? If the majority Industry shifts towards ARM ISA Intel will evolve, What stops Intel from Licensing the ARM Core and build a industry leading ARM Chip? I think no-one with the exception of Apple in the semiconductor industry has more resources than Intel to build a world class ARM CPU. Intel is just trying to drag x86 as far as p…

What stops Intel from Licensing the ARM Core and build a industry leading ARM Chip?

That others can compete directly on price. Intel can probably do it technically, but will not have the margins they had with x86.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#165

Post by gnufx »

Perhaps it's worth pointing out some context. Given the remarkable predecessor, K Computer, this was only a matter of time. (I heard a great early talk on K, and I wish I knew the speaker for credit who was obviously working quite hard in English, but flawless, ending with basically we did it all ourselves largely de nuovo.) It seems that given the current circumstances, they haven't kept to schedule -- it was supposed to be operating next year.

There's a lot non-mainstream in this, like K, but partly influenced by K experience. Unusually, it's all apparently specifically designed for the job, from the processor to the operating system (only partly GNU/Linux). Notably, despite the innovation, it should still run anything that can reasonably be built for aarch64 straight off and use the whole node, even if it doesn't run particularly fast; contrast GPU-based systems. (With something like simde, you may even be able to run typical x86-specific code.) However, the amount of memory/core is surprising -- even less than Blue Gene Q -- and I wonder how that works out for large-scale materials science work for which it's obviously prepared. Also note Fujitsu's consideration of reliability, though the oft-quoted theory of failure rates in exascale-ish machines was obviously wrong, otherwise as the Livermore CTO said, he'd be out of a job.

The bad news for anyone potentially operating a similar system in a university, for instance, is that the typical nightmare proprietary software is apparently becoming available for it...

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#166

Post by user5994461 »

rwmj wrote: post #25
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #22

We'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.

Google Cloud has a much superior interconnect, easily doing twice the bandwidth of AWS with lower latency.

Ethernet may not be approaching Infiniband in raw speed and latency, but I think it's doing pretty decently with 10 Gbps going to every node.

Ethernet networks are definitely much more competitive today than 10 years ago, when Infiniband already had cheap 20 Gbps network cards but 10 Gbps Ethernet card were expensive and the network switches were a rarity.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#167

Post by gnufx »

leeter wrote: post #161
gnufx wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an early user of KNL, I don't get the "GPU" bit. KNL runs normal x86_64 code and doesn't look that much different to the AMD Interlagos systems I once used apart from the memory architecture.

It comes from the fact that KNL came from Larrabee which was actually developed as a GPU initially (and even ran games... sort of) but was never actually released. The next revision of that was the Xeon Phi chips you used. So the connection is "Lots of small cores with lots of high bandwidth ram" although these cores are definitely superscalar where Larrabee and derivatives were not really. https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

Sure, but people don't normally think of "GPU" in this context as just runs all your x86_64 code.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#170

Post by giantrobot »

dawg- wrote: post #145
praveen9920 wrote: post #51

Pushing the boundaries is the best way to advance technology Car manufacturers need ridiculously expensive race cars to push the technology to get advancements in everyday car technology. Similarly, Top500 is one way to push the technology for not just computationally but also things like better power, heat and network management in processors and computers in general. With ever doubling server farms, Heat management…

>Heat management of these systems will become the major contributor for environmental pollution Here's an idea, maybe we should just turn the moon into a giant data center?

In a vacuum the only way to dissipate heat is radiation and to a lesser extent conduction. In an atmosphere you also have convection. It's more efficient to cool something on Earth than on the Moon.

We also have more power options on Earth. On the Moon you'd only really have solar power available and then only two weeks a month. On Earth you've got insolation for half a day every day and the option of other renewable sources.

This is all besides the phenomenal cost of building data centers on the Moon vs Earth.

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