The site of the organisation responsible for assessing the fastest computers in the world succumbs to the hacker news hug of death.
To be fair, I wouldn't host my website on my world-class supercomputer either, if I had one...
Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
21–30 of 220 posts
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#22We'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.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#23Given 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.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#24The site of the organisation responsible for assessing the fastest computers in the world succumbs to the hacker news hug of death.
To be fair, I wouldn't host my website on my world-class supercomputer either, if I had one...
To be even fairer, I've served a shit ton of traffic on a small DigitalOcean droplet and never had issues because my stack is reasonable.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#25We'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.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I wouldn't host my website on my world-class supercomputer either, if I had one...
To be even fairer, I've served a shit ton of traffic on a small DigitalOcean droplet and never had issues because my stack is reasonable.
What’s your stack, and how much traffic?
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I wouldn't host my website on my world-class supercomputer either, if I had one...
To be even fairer, I've served a shit ton of traffic on a small DigitalOcean droplet and never had issues because my stack is reasonable.
To be fairest you can serve pages on a potato and as long as it's cached by cloudflare no one will know.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#28Not 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.
From https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/openai-azure-supercomputer/:
"""The supercomputer developed for OpenAI is a single system with more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server. Compared with other machines listed on the TOP500 supercomputers in the world, it ranks in the top five, Microsoft says."""
Each of the big three cloud providers could, if they chose to, build a #1 Top500 computer using what they have available (that includes the CPUs, GPUs, and interconnect). That said, it's unclear why they would: the profit would be lower than if they sold the equivalent hardware, without the low-latency interconnect, to "regular" customers. The supercomputer business isn't obscenely profitable.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#29Not 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.
As blopeur said in another reply you need to feed data to the supercomputer, and as parallelizable as your algorithm may be some data might need to be shared between nodes at some point, just to name a couple of examples.
If you connect a lot of cloud instances to act as a giant distribute computing cluster they’ll receive/share/return data via network interfaces or yet worse the internet, this is really really slower than what super computers do.
For many applications that solution would be more efficient than a supercomputer, but for applications that need a supercomputer it would be inefficient. It just depends on what you need to do, but in any case it would be a computing cluster not a supercomputer.
(my two cents, I’m not into that field)
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#30I 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 application-specific.
It's even debatable, whether the A64FX can even be considered a "pure" RISC design, considering the inclusion of SVE-512 and its 4 unspecified "assistant cores" [2] ...
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-...
[2] https://www.fujitsu.com/jp/Images/20180821hotchips30.pdf