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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

#191

Post by m_mueller »

gnufx wrote: post #165

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 suppos…

Maybe you mean Matsuoka sensei? He's the director of RIKEN AICS since a couple of years and a known media figure in Japan.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#192

Post by m_mueller »

leeter wrote: post #32
fhqghds wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get ready for a surprise then: all those FLOPS are coming from the ARM cores.... This beast has no GPUs: https://postk-web.r-ccs.riken.jp/spec.html

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.

Besides FLOP/Watt what's also very interesting here is the FLOP/Byte ratio (memory bandwidth). It has kept the same balance as K computer, i.e. is geared at scientific workloads and not just benchmarks (duh, just worth pointing out here as it makes this machine quite special especially compared to Xeon based clusters - Intel IMO has dropped the ball on bandwidth since the last 5 years or so).

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#193

Post by guicho271828 »

gnufx wrote: post #165

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 suppos…

FYI, https://github.com/fujitsu/A64FX

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#194

Post by bashinator »

gpderetta wrote: post #23
ViralBShah wrote: post #3

Given 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…

Fujitsu has been building its own HPC CPUs, for a long time, whether they use the ARM architecture or SPARC doesn't probably matter much for them. They know how to make them fast.

Yup, one of my first jobs out of college was at HAL.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#195

Post by ganzuul »

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…

The EUV machines are made in the US.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#196

Post by blueblisters »

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?

Meh building underwater makes more sense imo. Microsoft is already doing this: https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-...

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#197

Post by throwaway5792 »

gpderetta wrote: post #180
dman wrote: post #50

Really wish Fujitsu sold a developer kit with an A64fx chip - its the only shipping ARM chip with SVE that I know of and I would love to get my hands on one to play with.

> its the only shipping ARM chip with SVE IIRC the extension was specifically designed by Fujitsu for their needs, so it is not surprising.

Not quite, although they were deeply involved for much of it.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#198

Post by btian »

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…

I can't disagree more. The US semiconductor industry is more vibrant than ever.

Intel reported record quarter every quarter for the last 2-3 years.

Fabless semiconductors are doing better than ever - nVidia, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Google TPU etc.

Most of the high performance ARM SoCs come from Apple and Qualcomm, both American companies.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#199

Post by numpad0 »

d_tr wrote: post #125
Merrill wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like this is not an ARM core, but a Fujitsu implementation of the Arm v8-A instruction set and Fujitsu-developed Scaleable Vector Extension. Most likely the latter is doing all the heavy lifting. https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-re... >A64FX is the world's first CPU to adopt the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), an extension of Armv8-A instruction set architecture for supercomputers.…

The text you linked to actually says that the SVE was developed cooperatively by Fujitsu and ARM, without, however, going into details about who did what.

There are words floating that A64fx is basically a SPARC with ARM ISA without much ARM IP in it, no idea how accurate but intriguing

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#200

Post by freeflight »

tom_mellior wrote: post #178
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…

> What's left for Intel? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... , about 80% to 90% of the desktop and laptop computer market (counting the share of Windows + Linux devices in these categories). Intel won't starve.

Which is the result of AMD not having been able to compete for close to a decade.

Expect to see these numbers change drastically over the next years as Zen 2 finally turned the ship around on that by not only making AMD CPUs competitive, but in many cases the straight up better, yet still more affordable, choice.

Which is already reflected in current trends: Barely any consumer-level hardware outlets still recommend Intel builds, which is down to lack of PCIe 4.0 support and only very expensive Intel CPUs being able to outperform AMD CPUs in fringe-use cases like single-core performance in gaming, while still demanding a hefty price-premium.

A premium that many people are simply not willing to pay for anymore.

As a small data point just look at the top 10 CPUs on price comparison websites, like German pcgameshardware [0]: 8 out of the top 10 CPUs are all AMD.

Which will not mean that Intel will starve, but it very much puts them into the position that AMD has been in these past years, that of the underdog fighting an uphill battle to regain relevancy in the consumer sector.

[0] https://preisvergleich.pcgameshardware.de/?o=4

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