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Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

top500.org

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Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#51
Pushing the boundaries is the best way to advance technology

Car manufacturers need ridiculously expensive race cars to push the technology to get advancements in everyday car technology. Similarly, Top500 is one way to push the technology for not just computationally but also things like better power, heat and network management in processors and computers in general.

With ever doubling server farms, Heat management of these systems will become the major contributor for environmental pollution than all vehicle exhaust. Rather than spending on renewable sources of energy for these farms, it makes sense to optimize energy consumed per processor. Hoping to see advancements in this area

In my opinion, next arm/intel will be the company who does energy efficient processors

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#52
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bo…

Step by step instructions for building an Arm-based MPI cluster using Raspberry Pis: https://epcced.github.io/wee_archlet/

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#53
post #11
post #6

Can any of the HPC experts shed some light on how these ARM chips are better than their predecessors. I toured a small cluster in LANL, where the ARM chips ran the hottest and their cooling was the loudest.

A64fx have on board HMB -> that means no dram. If you look at the fugaku mother board their is no Dimm slots. All the memory is on the same package as the CPU. This delivers a huge boost in bandwith. HMB stand for high memory bandwidth. It offers up to 900 GB/s. Now if you add the tofu interconnect on top you have a systems finely tuned for maximising data movement. Remember : compute is cheap, communication is expen…

For a more in depth dive :

"Report on the Fujitsu Fugaku (富岳) System", Jack Dongarra, Jun 22, 2020

https://www.dropbox.com/s/aqntdb43p6so0z5/fugaku-report.pdf?...

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#55

Given 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…

> And then there's the ARM in Mac.

Are you posting from the future or referring to the T2 chips?

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#56

Pushing the boundaries is the best way to advance technology Car manufacturers need ridiculously expensive race cars to push the technology to get advancements in everyday car technology. Similarly, Top500 is one way to push the technology for not just computationally but also things like better power, heat and network management in processors and computers in general. With ever doubling server farms, Heat management…

[deleted]

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#57
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Simple, human error and no code review process for your production environment.

Something similar happened to a huge retailer here in Austria where just typing your username without password would log you in. Reason? An intern committed debug code to production and nobody noticed. In my book that's not the fault of the intern but the fault of the CTO/$TECH_LEAD that hasn't implemented and religiously uphold a code review process for everything that goes into production since stuff like this could happen even to experienced engineers that are tired or having a bad day.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#58
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That can happen when maintainers are professional scientists rather than professional web developers

update: added "professional" before "scientists"

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#59
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…

You could use MPI and OpenMP. I got my start building an 10megabit ethernet cluster of 6 machines for $15K (this would have been back in ~2000). It only scaled about 4X using 6 machines, but that was still good enough/cheap enough to replace a bunch of more expensive SGIs, Suns, and HP machines.

Where the bottleneck is depends entirely on many details of the computations you wanted to run. IN many cases, you can get trivial embarassing parallelism if you can break your problem into N parts and there doesn't need to be any real communication between the processors running the distinct parts. In that case, memory bandwidth and clock rate are the bottleneck. but if you're running something like ML training with tight coupling, then the throughput and latency of the network can definitely be a problem.

Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

#60

I cannot think of any plausible way in which Apple could have influenced the date of this announcement, but the timing, given what is expected to be announced later today, is uncanny.

Imagine if Apple were to announce a Mac utilise the exact same chip. A powerful high TDP CPU will be great fit for Apple, while they continue to focus on low power and energy efficiency for their mainstream product.
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