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AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

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Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#21

Post by belter »

dekhn wrote: post #17
belter wrote: post #6

Thank you to the authors for not calling it the fastest computer in the world :-) and instead, as they should, the most powerful. Clock speed is not the only factor of course, as instruction per cycle and cache sizes have an impact, but for a pure measure of speed, the fastest still is: - For practical use, and non overclocked, the EC12 at 5.5 Ghz: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248049.pdf or - An AMD F…

Clock rates of CPUs are not a measure of "speed". Time to solution is the measure of speed. There have historically been computers with lower clock rates with higher rates of results production (larger cache, more work done per cycle).

That was why I mentioned cache and of course we could talk MIPS.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#22

Post by mihaic »

uniqueuid wrote: post #10
mihaic wrote: post #8

The more powerful processors become, the less I feel there's a need to build supercomputers. Thinking about it, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is pretty much a million consumer processors, working in parallel. That's going to stay pretty constant, since cost scales roughly linearly. If X is the processing power of $1k of consumer hardware, the bigger X gets, the less there is a difference in the class o…

Sure, but consumer hardware does not have infiniband or other high-bandwidth interconnects. That means you can have at most ~1-2TB of ram accessible at any point. Some problems need coordination, and when you're back at OpenMP etc., a supercomputer suddenly makes sense.

I agree right now, I'm thinking maybe in 15 years you can have >1PB on a single machine, and then those problems that don't fit in that space but that fit in a supercomputer become fewer. 2050 will be within out lifetime.

Basically I'm estimating the benefit ratio to be (log SupercomputerSize - log ConsumerSize)/log ConsumerSize, and that keeps decreasing.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#23

Post by belter »

chrisseaton wrote: post #15
belter wrote: post #6

Thank you to the authors for not calling it the fastest computer in the world :-) and instead, as they should, the most powerful. Clock speed is not the only factor of course, as instruction per cycle and cache sizes have an impact, but for a pure measure of speed, the fastest still is: - For practical use, and non overclocked, the EC12 at 5.5 Ghz: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248049.pdf or - An AMD F…

> Clock speed When people talk about a supercomputer being 'fast' they generally mean FLOPS - floating point operations per seconds, which isn't clock-speed.

My algorithm is single threaded :-)

Multiplying the number of processors by the clock speed of the processors, and then multiplying that product by the number of floating-point operations the processors can perform in one second, as done for supercomputers FLOPS, does not help me :-)

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#24

Post by JonChesterfield »

uniqueuid wrote: post #2

Since they are using AMD's accelerators as well [1], I do wonder whether any usage of these will trickle down and give us improvements in ROCm. Surely the people at these labs will want to run ordinary DL frameworks at some point - or do they have the money and time to always build entirely custom stacks? [1] AMD Instinct MI250x in this case.

The rocm stack is one of the toolchains deployed on Frontier. With determination, llvm upstream and rocm libraries can be manually assembled into a working toolchain too. It's not so much trickle down improvements as the same code.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#25

Post by mastax »

mihaic wrote: post #8

The more powerful processors become, the less I feel there's a need to build supercomputers. Thinking about it, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is pretty much a million consumer processors, working in parallel. That's going to stay pretty constant, since cost scales roughly linearly. If X is the processing power of $1k of consumer hardware, the bigger X gets, the less there is a difference in the class o…

The coherent memory interconnects between nodes is typically what makes supercomputers different than just a bunch of consumer hardware. It allows different types of programming or at least makes them easier.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#26

Post by xhkkffbf »

mihaic wrote: post #8

The more powerful processors become, the less I feel there's a need to build supercomputers. Thinking about it, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is pretty much a million consumer processors, working in parallel. That's going to stay pretty constant, since cost scales roughly linearly. If X is the processing power of $1k of consumer hardware, the bigger X gets, the less there is a difference in the class o…

If you think of it this way, aren't some botnets truly the most powerful computing systems?

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#27

Post by dekhn »

belter wrote: post #21
dekhn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clock rates of CPUs are not a measure of "speed". Time to solution is the measure of speed. There have historically been computers with lower clock rates with higher rates of results production (larger cache, more work done per cycle).

That was why I mentioned cache and of course we could talk MIPS.

But those are only proxy variables to explain "performance", or "throughput", or "latency". No doubt, if I wanted a fast single machine, the two configs you showed would both be nice- the former because it's an off-the-shelf part that just "runs stuff faster" than most slower processors, and the latter because it represents the limit of what a person with some infrastructure can do (although, TBH, I'd double check every result the system generated).

Ultimately, however, no system is measured by its clock rate- or by its cache size- or by its MIPS. Because no real workload is truly determined by a simple linear function of those variables.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#28

Post by formerly_proven »

belter wrote: post #6

Thank you to the authors for not calling it the fastest computer in the world :-) and instead, as they should, the most powerful. Clock speed is not the only factor of course, as instruction per cycle and cache sizes have an impact, but for a pure measure of speed, the fastest still is: - For practical use, and non overclocked, the EC12 at 5.5 Ghz: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248049.pdf or - An AMD F…

I guarantee you an FX-8370 isn't even close to being the fastest CPU even at 10 GHz. I bet most desktop CPUs you can buy nowadays will be faster out of the box.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#29

Post by mastax »

uniqueuid wrote: post #2

Since they are using AMD's accelerators as well [1], I do wonder whether any usage of these will trickle down and give us improvements in ROCm. Surely the people at these labs will want to run ordinary DL frameworks at some point - or do they have the money and time to always build entirely custom stacks? [1] AMD Instinct MI250x in this case.

These supercomputer contracts typically have a large amount dedicated to software support. I remember reading on AnandTech (?) that AMD was explicitly putting a bunch of engineers on ROCm for this project. It's one of the reason companies like these contracts so much.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#30

Post by belter »

__alexs wrote: post #19
belter wrote: post #6

Thank you to the authors for not calling it the fastest computer in the world :-) and instead, as they should, the most powerful. Clock speed is not the only factor of course, as instruction per cycle and cache sizes have an impact, but for a pure measure of speed, the fastest still is: - For practical use, and non overclocked, the EC12 at 5.5 Ghz: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248049.pdf or - An AMD F…

Yes the fastest computers are those aboard the Parker Solar Probe at 690,000 km/h.

For those, the calculations need to included relativistic effects into your algo:-) The Sun gravity affects clock cycles, time relativistic distortions... :-)

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/348854/parker-so...

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