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A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

nature.com

31–40 of 60 posts

Re: A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

#31

I have a project on Frontier - happy to answer any questions! Funny story about Bronson Messer (quoted in the article): On my first trip to Oak Ridge we went on a tour of “The Machine”. Afterwards we were hanging out on the observation deck and got introduced to something like 10 people. Everyone at Oak Ridge is just Tom, Bob, etc. No titles or any of that stuff - I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone refer to themselv…

Hey, my sister Katie is the reason he wasn't a 4 day champ! Beat him by $1. She also lost her next game

Hah, that’s amazing!

Now I get to tell him this story next time I see him :).

Re: A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

#32
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anyone refer to themselves or anyone else as "Doctor". Reminds me of the t-shirt I had that said, "Ok, Ok, so you've got a PhD. Just don't touch anything."

I think when I walked back into my defense and they said "congratulations, Doctor Drucker" was the last time anyone ever called me Doctor except for possibly a hotel clerk when I selected 'Dr' as my honorific. It's just not in the culture, assuming you mostly work among other PhDs.

Growing up my dad was a very well known PhD in his field (Occupational Therapy).

There were quite a few people who insisted on using Doctor when referring to others, calling themselves Doctor, etc.

He never did but I experienced it quite a bit.

Re: A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

#33
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when I walked back into my defense and they said "congratulations, Doctor Drucker" was the last time anyone ever called me Doctor except for possibly a hotel clerk when I selected 'Dr' as my honorific. It's just not in the culture, assuming you mostly work among other PhDs.

Growing up my dad was a very well known PhD in his field (Occupational Therapy). There were quite a few people who insisted on using Doctor when referring to others, calling themselves Doctor, etc. He never did but I experienced it quite a bit.

I'm talking about scientific/research PhDs, not medical. The title is absolutely used in medical.

Re: A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

#34
post #20

> With its nearly 38,000 GPUs, Frontier occupies a unique public-sector role in the field of AI research, which is otherwise dominated by industry. Is it really realistic to assume that this is the "fastest supercomputer"? What are estimated sizes for supercomputers used by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google etc? Strangely enough, the Nature piece only mentions possible secret military supercomputers, but not ones used by AI…

There's a pretty big difference between the workloads that these supercomputers run, and those running big LLM models (to be clear, hyperscalars also often have "supercomputers" more like the DoE laboratories for rent).

AI models are trained using one of {Data parallelism, tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism}. These all have fairly regular access patterns, and want bandwidth.

Traditional supercomputer loads {Typically MPI or SHMEM} are often far more variable in access pattern, and synchronization is often incredibly carefully optimized. Bandwidth is still hugely important here, but insane network switches and topologies tend to be the real secret sauce.

More and more these machines are built using commodity hardware (instead of stuff like Knight's Landing from Intel), but the switches and network topology are still often pretty bespoke. This is required for really fine-tuned algorithms like distributed LU factorization, or matrix multiplication algorithms like COSMOS. The hyperscalars often want insane levels of commodity hardware including network switches instead.

The AI supercomputers you're citing are getting a lot closer, but they are definitely more disaggregated than DoE lab machines by nature of the software they run.

Re: A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

#35
post #23
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between a supercomputer and just a large cluster of compute nodes: mainly this is in the bandwidth between the nodes. I suspect industry uses a larger number of smaller groups of highly-connected GPUs for AI work.

Do you mean this supercomputer has slower internode links? What are its links? For example, xAI just brought up 100k GPU cluster, most likely with 800Gbps internode links, or maybe even double that. I think the main difference is in the target numerical precision: supercomputers such as this one focus on maximizing FP64 throughput, while GPU clusters used by OpenAI or xAI want to compute in 16 or even 8 bit precision…

It's not just about the link speeds, it's about the topologies used.

Google style infrastructure uses aggregation trees. This works well for fan out fan back in communication patterns, but has limited bisection bandwidth at the core/top of the tree. This can be mitigated with clos networks / fat trees, but in practice no one goes for full bisection bandwidth on these systems as the cost and complexity aren't justified.

HPC machines typically use torus topology variants. This allows 2d and 3d grid style computations to be directly mapped onto the system with nearly full bisection bandwidth. Each smallest grid element can communicate directly with its neighbors each iteration, without going over intermediate switches.

Reliability is handled quite a bit different too. Google style infrastructure does this with elaborations of the map reduce style: spot the stranglers or failures, reallocate that work via software. HPC infrastructure puts more emphasis on hardware reliability.

You're right that F32 and F64 performance are more important on HPC, while Google apps are mostly integer only, and ML apps can use lower precision formats like F16.

Re: A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

#36

I have a project on Frontier - happy to answer any questions! Funny story about Bronson Messer (quoted in the article): On my first trip to Oak Ridge we went on a tour of “The Machine”. Afterwards we were hanging out on the observation deck and got introduced to something like 10 people. Everyone at Oak Ridge is just Tom, Bob, etc. No titles or any of that stuff - I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone refer to themselv…

> anyone refer to themselves or anyone else as "Doctor". Reminds me of the t-shirt I had that said, "Ok, Ok, so you've got a PhD. Just don't touch anything."

Do you happen to remember where you got that shirt?

Asking for a friend. The friend is me. I desperately want that shirt (assuming it's well designed).

It will complement my "Rage Against The Machine Learning" shirt that I'm wearing right now.

Re: A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

#37

What's the documentation like for supercomputers? I.e. when a researcher gets approved to use a supercomputer, do they get lots of documentation explaining how to set up and run their program? I got the sense from a physicist buddy that a lot of experimental physics stuff is shared informally and never written down. Or maybe each field has a couple popular frameworks for running simulations, and the Frontier people j…

You run things more or less like you do on your Linux workstation. The only difference is you run your top-level script or program through a batch processing system on a headend node.

You typically develop programs with MPI/OpenMP to exploit multiple nodes and CPUs. In Fortran, this entails a few pragmas and compiler flags.

Re: A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

#38
post #20

> With its nearly 38,000 GPUs, Frontier occupies a unique public-sector role in the field of AI research, which is otherwise dominated by industry. Is it really realistic to assume that this is the "fastest supercomputer"? What are estimated sizes for supercomputers used by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google etc? Strangely enough, the Nature piece only mentions possible secret military supercomputers, but not ones used by AI…

Microsoft has a system at current #3 spot on the Top500 list. It uses 14.4k Nividia H100s and got about 1/2 the flops of Frontier.

It’s the fastest publicly disclosed. As far as private concerns, I feel like a “prove it” approach is valid.

https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/06/

Re: A day in the life of the fastest supercomputer

#39
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anyone refer to themselves or anyone else as "Doctor". Reminds me of the t-shirt I had that said, "Ok, Ok, so you've got a PhD. Just don't touch anything."

Do you happen to remember where you got that shirt? Asking for a friend. The friend is me. I desperately want that shirt (assuming it's well designed). It will complement my "Rage Against The Machine Learning" shirt that I'm wearing right now.

I had it custom made. Sorry that I can't point you to something already done :(

It's much easier and cheaper than in the past to just go to Ali-express and find a shop with good feedback and cotton shirts, upload a graphic (even if it's just text in a specific font and size), and wait a month. I usually pay around $10 each.

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