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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

#51

Post by belter »

chrisseaton wrote: post #47
belter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is clear for me what they are for, and why I would not use it for a single-threaded task.

I was trolling a little bit, the people who downvoted my measure of speed :-) because the millions of FLOPS of a supercomputer, will help for parallel tasks but will not be "faster" for a common use case.

So fastest computer is one thing, most powerful is another.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#52

Post by blackoil »

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 :-)

More than your algorithm, seems you are on the wrong thread.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#53

Post by pinhead »

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.

Surprisingly, ROCm support has been getting a lot better over the very recent years. In my experience the pytorch support is essentially seamless between CUDA and ROCm. Also, I know some popular frameworks like DeepSpeed have announced support and benchmarks on it as well: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2022/03/21/suppo...

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#54

Post by belter »

jabl wrote: post #48
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 :-)

> 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.

My initial argument since the beginning of this thread, is that it's the most powerful computer not the fastest, as it will not be, for the case for some single threaded task. Not really sure what is so controversial about it...:-)

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#55

Post by dekhn »

Symmetry wrote: post #49
dragontamer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's kind of surprising that nvidia hasn't purchased AMD. It really feels like there's a single company between the two that would be truly effective- AMD for the classic CPU oomph, nvidia for the GPU oomph, combining their strengths in interconnects. It would be a player from the high-end PC to the supercomputer market, without even pretending to go for the low-power market (ARM).

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#56

Post by adrian_b »

gsibble wrote: post #13

What an incredible achievement. Good for AMD. The Epyc is a fantastic processor. And there are another 2 (3?) faster systems coming online in the next year or so.

Besides being the first system exceeding the 1 Exaflop/s threshold, what is more impressive is that this is also the system with the highest ratio between computational speed and power consumption (i.e. the AMD devices have the first place in both Top500 and Green500).

The AMD GPUs with the CDNA ISA have surpassed in energy efficiency both the NVIDIA A100 GPUs and the Fujitsu ARM with SVE CPUs, which had been the best previously.

Unfortunately, AMD has stopped selling at retail such GPUs suitable for double-precision computations.

Until 5 or 6 years ago, the AMD GPUs were neither the fastest nor the most energy-efficient, but they had by far the best performance per dollar of any devices that could be used for double-precision floating-point computations.

However, when they have made the transition to RDNA, they have separated their gaming and datacenter GPUs. The former are useless for DP computations and the latter cannot be bought by individuals or small companies.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#57

Post by O5vYtytb »

belter wrote: post #51
chrisseaton wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is clear for me what they are for, and why I would not use it for a single-threaded task. I was trolling a little bit, the people who downvoted my measure of speed :-) because the millions of FLOPS of a supercomputer, will help for parallel tasks but will not be "faster" for a common use case. So fastest computer is one thing, most powerful is another.

"fastest" is accurate. You can get more computation work done in less time given an appropriate workload. No matter what adjective you use, "fastest" or "powerful", you're always within a context of an intended workload.

Your argument is a bit like saying the fastest land speed vehicle isn't really the fastest because you can't go to the grocery store with it.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#58

Post by jcranmer »

dekhn wrote: post #55
Symmetry wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's kind of surprising that nvidia hasn't purchased AMD. It really feels like there's a single company between the two that would be truly effective- AMD for the classic CPU oomph, nvidia for the GPU oomph, combining their strengths in interconnects. It would be a player from the high-end PC to the supercomputer market, without even pretending to go for the low-power market (ARM).

> It's kind of surprising that nvidia hasn't purchased AMD.

One word: antitrust. The discrete GPU market these days consists of Nvidia and AMD, with Intel only just now dipping its toes into the market (I don't think there's anything saleable to retail customers yet). Nvidia buying AMD would make it a true monopoly in that market, and there's no way that would pass antitrust regulators. Nvidia recently tried to buy ARM, and even that transaction was enough for antitrust regulators to say no.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#59

Post by chrisseaton »

belter wrote: post #54
jabl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My initial argument since the beginning of this thread, is that it's the most powerful computer not the fastest, as it will not be, for the case for some single threaded task. Not really sure what is so controversial about it...:-)

> as it will not be, for the case for some single threaded task

Nobody but you is confused about this.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#60

Post by _Wintermute »

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?

You say this, but unfortunately I've encountered a few life-scientists who think their single threaded R code will run faster because they've requested 128 cores and 4 GPUs.
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