This kind of feels like a publicity stunt for Arm. Arm is owned by the Japanese company SoftBank and now Japan captures the supercomputer crown. I don't want to take away from the achievement and it's certainly possible that this is just a coincidence, maybe someone with more knowledge on the subject can comment on this?
Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
181–190 of 220 posts
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#182The link is working for me, here are the details on the winner. “The new top system, Fugaku, turned in a High Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, besting the now second-place Summit system by a factor of 2.8x. Fugaku, is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, becoming the first number one system on the list to be powered by ARM processors. In single or further reduced precision, which are often used…
Wow, so we've hit exascale. I heard claims that we would reach exascale by 2020 in 2012. I didn't believe them.
0.5 exascale
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#183Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#184Given that today's HPC architectures are mostly power constrained, and a majority of the FLOPS often come from GPUs (for their flop/watt ratios), this direction is not surprising. ARM has been making major strides in the high performance area. The new AWS Graviton processors are pretty nice from what I have heard. And then there's the ARM in Mac. Yup and Julia will run on all of these! While I say all of this, I shou…
> And then there's the ARM in Mac. Are you posting from the future or referring to the T2 chips?
It was officially announced at the end of the WWDC event today.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#185Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#186This kind of feels like a publicity stunt for Arm. Arm is owned by the Japanese company SoftBank and now Japan captures the supercomputer crown. I don't want to take away from the achievement and it's certainly possible that this is just a coincidence, maybe someone with more knowledge on the subject can comment on this?
Fujitsu announced they would be building a Kei2 based on ARM, soon after their Kei was #1 around 5 years ago.
ARM was a British company until it was bought by SoftBank a couple of years ago.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#187Not to be dismissive, but can't anyone "build" the biggest supercomputer by reserving enough instances at AWS or GCP? I'm sure that AWS or GCP would like to encourage this competition, but it seems a bit, well, boring.
AWS has made it into the top500 a few times in fact, though not that high on the list. I think the main issue would be reserving enough machines that have a high performance network between them, which is not a typical cloud need. But the more interesting question for me is: on an embarrassingly parallel workload, how does Amazon’s full infrastructure compare to these top machines? I’d assume that Amazon keeps that a…
Looking into Amazon's power bill might be a useful start: Fugaku is listed as drawing 28 MW in OP. It's more power efficient than most, but to an order of magnitude that's a number we can work with. Amazon's power usage for US-East was estimated at 1.06 GW in 2017 [1] (at which time they also apparently owned about a gigawatt of renewable generating capacity [2], now closer to 2 GW [3]).
Either way you slice it, Amazon likely owns at least an order of magnitude more FLOPS than any single system on the top500. What they presumably don't have is the low latency interconnects, etc., needed for traditional supercomputing.
[1] https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-approaches-1-gigawatt-...
[2] https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060048034
[3] https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/sustainable-operation...
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#188I can't help but think that the top minds from Cyrix aren't feeling both smug at the vindication and dismayed that they were just a little too ahead of the curve. The writing was on the wall that RISC would win, but the x86 juggernaut appeared unbeatable.
> The writing was on the wall that RISC would win [...] What do you mean by "win" exactly? RISC is just an architectural choice and means nothing on its own. For reference, Google's TPUs, which - according to Google - deliver 30-80x better performance per Watt than contemporary CPUs, use a CISC design instead [1]. This whole "RISC vs CISC"-nonsense is quite inane, given that it's a design choice that's highly applica…
RISC is a philosophy, not so much a set of rules. If you let the creators of RISC define their approach, the division between RISC and CISC becomes more clear. Most summaries of RISC oversimplify it. Maybe that’s ironic, haha.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#189is x86 likely to ever go away, or anytime soon? asking as a non-systems guy
Not for a long time. ARM is just more competition which is good. The guys claiming that Intel is basically a has been and can't make anything new don't know what they're talking about. Intel has come back more than once. Competition is good, I'm glad it's heating up a bit more these days.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#190There's something amusing about a blog post announcing the fastest computer in the world being unable to serve up web requests in under 10 seconds. (When I wrote this comment, I was seeing 500 status code errors when trying to load the page)
True, but we can blame the programmer as we usually do