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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

#41

Post by chrisseaton »

belter wrote: post #23
chrisseaton wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :-)

Why would you run a single-threaded algorithm on a supercomputer?

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#42

Post by PartiallyTyped »

formerly_proven wrote: post #28
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.

It's embarrassing how slow that thing is compared to CPUs 2 years ago...

The video below compares 8150 against CPUs from 2020 (i.e. no 5900x or 12900KS), includes data from 8370.

https://youtu.be/RpcDF-qQHIo?t=425

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#43

Post by Bayart »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #37
scardycat wrote: post #32

Congratulations to AMD, HPE and ORNL! This is an amazing achievement. Can't wait to see the spectacular science results coming from this installation. Intel was supposed to build the first Exascale system for ANL [1] [2]. to be installed by 2018. They completely and utterly messed up the execution, partly drive by 10nm failure, went back to the drawing board multiple times, and now Raja switched the whole thing to GP…

What is Raja?

Raja Koduri, the head of Graphics at Intel. Before that he was leading the Radeon group at AMD. He's been doing GPU stuff since the 90s.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#44

Post by tormeh »

torrance wrote: post #5
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.

I’m not using Frontier, but I am using Setonix which is a large AMD cluster being rolled out in Australia. All of AMD’s teaching materials are about ROCm so this is very much how they’re expecting it to be used. The real pain for us is that there’s no decent consumer grade chips with ROCm compatibility for us to do development on. AMD have made it very clear they only care about the data centre hardware when it comes…

It's bare pickings, but there are chips: https://docs.amd.com/bundle/Hardware_and_Software_Reference_...

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#45

Post by jabl »

mastax wrote: post #25
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.

It's a very fast, very low latency network fabric. But it's not coherent in the sense of cache coherent multiprocessors, and it doesn't offer shared memory style programming where you'd just load/store to addresses that happen to be mapped to another compute node somewhere in the system.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#46

Post by belter »

chrisseaton wrote: post #41
belter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Why would you run a single-threaded algorithm on a supercomputer?

Because some say they are fastest computers in the world ;-)

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#47

Post by chrisseaton »

belter wrote: post #46
chrisseaton wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you run a single-threaded algorithm on a supercomputer?

Because some say they are fastest computers in the world ;-)

I think you're possibly misunderstanding what these supercomputers are for. They just aren't designed for whatever single-threaded workload you personally have, so it's not in scope.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#48

Post by jabl »

belter wrote: post #23
chrisseaton wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :-)

> My algorithm is single threaded :-)

And why should your algorithm be the benchmark for supercomputer performance, rather than something that is at least somewhat related [1] to the workloads those machines run?

[1] We can of course argue endlessly that HPL is no longer a very representative benchmark for supercomputer workloads, but I digress.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#49

Post by Symmetry »

dragontamer wrote: post #3
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.

> Surely the people at these labs will want to run ordinary DL frameworks at some point I don't know about that. A lot of these labs are doing physics simulations and are probably happy to stick with their dense-matrix multiply / BLAS routines. Deep learning is a newer thing. These national labs can run them of course, but these national labs have existed for many decades and have plenty of work to do without deep le…

Also, while NVidia has been adding extra AI acceleration to their chips AMD has been throwing in extra double precision resources that HPC generally requires. If you're training an AI rather than simulating the climate/a thermonuclear explosion/etc then you're probably better off using NVidia cards but AMD made the right technical investments to get these supercomputer contracts.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#50

Post by babypuncher »

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…

Supercomputer power has been measured in FLOPS for decades now, even in popular media coverage.
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