Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

top500.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 220 posts

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#41

Post by sushshshsh »

fhqghds wrote: post #14
xhkkffbf wrote: post #8

Not 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.

yyyeah... no. A major part of what makes these machines special is their interconnect. Fujitsu is running a 6D torus interconnect with latencies well in the sub-usecond range. The special sauce is ability of cores to interact with each other with extreme bandwidth at extremely low latencies.

Thank you for this helpful info. For comparison's sake, say that you wanted to make babby's first super computer in your house with 2 laptops. That is to say, each laptop is a single core x86 system with its own motherboard and ram and ssd, and they are connected to each other in some way (ethernet? usb?)

What software would one use to distribute some workload between these two nodes, what would the latency and bandwidth be bottlenecked by (the network connection?) and what other key statistics would be important in measuring exactly how this cheap $400 (used) set up compares to price/watt/flop performance for top 500 computers?

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#42

Post by vmception »

devwastaken wrote: post #27
3pt14159 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and yet, they didn't

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#43

Post by Hamuko »

lorenzhs wrote: post #40
davidhyde wrote: post #12

The site of the organisation responsible for assessing the fastest computers in the world succumbs to the hacker news hug of death.

Oh my, it's a django app with debug mode enabled. I just got an InterfaceError with the full traceback and django configuration. (I've emailed them so they can fix it)

Just how in the world are people deploying Django apps with DEBUG = True?

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#44

Post by leeter »

stephencanon wrote: post #34
leeter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "traditional CPU" portion of the core is a bit more capable than KNL, but yeah, that's roughly accurate.

Oh agreed, but honestly what makes this so interesting is how tuned it is. I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen Intel or AMD ship an HPC CPU with on package HBM2 yet.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#46

Post by rrss »

mtgx wrote: post #9

Also a king in efficiency: https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/11/22/arm-supercomputer-ca...

The full scale supercomputer is not quite as efficient as the prototype.

> The number nine system on the Green500 is the top-performing Fugaku supercomputer, which delivered 14.67 gigaflops per watt. It is just behind Summit in power efficiency, which achieved 14.72 gigaflops/watt.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#47

Post by floren »

sushshshsh wrote: post #41
fhqghds wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yyyeah... no. A major part of what makes these machines special is their interconnect. Fujitsu is running a 6D torus interconnect with latencies well in the sub-usecond range. The special sauce is ability of cores to interact with each other with extreme bandwidth at extremely low latencies.

Thank you for this helpful info. For comparison's sake, say that you wanted to make babby's first super computer in your house with 2 laptops. That is to say, each laptop is a single core x86 system with its own motherboard and ram and ssd, and they are connected to each other in some way (ethernet? usb?) What software would one use to distribute some workload between these two nodes, what would the latency and bandw…

The thing to keep in mind about supercomputers is that they are designed for particular applications. Nuclear weapons simulation, biological analysis (can we run simulations and get a vaccine?), cryptanalysis. These applications are usually written in MPI, which is what coordinates communication between nodes.

If you want to play with it at home, connect those laptops to an ethernet network and install MPI on them both--you should be able to find tutorials with a little web searching. Then you could probably run Linpack if you felt like it, but if you wanted to learn a little more about how HPC applications actually work, you could write your own MPI application. I wrote an MPI raytracer in college; it's a relatively quick project and, again, you can probably find a tutorial for it online.

Edit: Your cluster is going to suck terribly in comparison to "real" supercomputers, but scientists frequently do build their own small-scale clusters for application development. The actual big machines like Sequoia are all batch-processing and must be scheduled in advance, so it's a lot easier (and cheaper, supercomputer time costs money) to test your application locally in real-time.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#48

Post by mxcrossb »

sushshshsh wrote: post #39
floren wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ranking is calculated based on the Linpack benchmark. Being a parallel application, performance is not simply scaled to number of processors; the network interconnect is hugely important. Now, although Linpack is a better evaluation metric for a supercomputer than simply totaling up # of processors and RAM size, it's still a very specific benchmark of questionable real-world utility; people like it because it giv…

I am curious to learn a bit more about how supercomputer scores measure proportionally to "real world performance", which is a hard thing to quantify since there are probably hundreds of different application "types" in the "real world". Combine this with the fact that many applications are limited by network throughput rather than by CPU/SSD/RAM/PCIE, and performance becomes a hard thing to quantify even in terms of…

HPCG is another benchmark on the Top500 site, and it’s more of a real world benchmark. It’s of course not perfect, but maybe that’s more what you’re looking for.
Post reply on HN