51–60 of 72 posts
If they truly wanted to solve world problems, they need to allow an AGI company like DeepMind or OpenAI to use it. The people now using it are likely wasting so much money using outdated technologies.
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To me 50 megawatts is the baseline of what I would expect for a decent cluster.
Perhaps you in fact forgot how to count lower than 50.
I remember in early 2000's trying to convince people to use linux and being mocked that it was a "toy" or "not professional enough". While at the time I tried to argue how it was more stable, more secure and better performant than competition and even arguing that it was improving continuously, some people still made fun of me. It is a good thing I've been able, for a long time, to see this: https://www.top500.org/st…
I'm pretty bullish on the long term survival of Linux in some form or other, proprietary OS's not so much.
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Are you kidding? You know a single widebody airliner uses more energy than that, right?
Widebody airliners aren't doing much for the climate, either.
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HIP is basically CUDA with s/cuda/hip/g. My experience is that the stack is pretty rough around the edges. But when it works, you (almost) literally find-and-replace, and it pretty much works as advertised. However, just because you can get to a correct code doesn't necessarily mean that code will achieve optimal performance (without further tuning, of course).
Not only tuning the code, but also the bazillion knobs on the GPUs themselves.
21 MW power! Insane. Interestingly, the second one is 30 MW.
This is the first I have noticed them reporting power draw. It seems immoral to run it for anything that doesn't help stop global climate catastrophe. (Presumably global thermonuclear war would suffice. But carbon capture afterward would be hard to arrange for.) Wondering if they measure while benchmarking, or add up max power ratings of the chips. Did any old mainframe ever burn like that? E.g. the first big USAF mi…
(498 kW for 229 GFlops. 136,317 times more power draw per flops than the current leader on the Green500.)
21 MW power! Insane. Interestingly, the second one is 30 MW.
For reference, Roadrunner, which was the first petascale system in 2008, used 2.35 MW (according to Wikipedia). So this one gives us 1,000 times the performance for 10 times the energy. From a performance/Watt perspective, this is an impressive improvement. EDIT: Wikipedia also says Roadrunner was not considered power-efficient in its day, which led to it being decommissioned after only five years of operation.
There's a bit of drama in that there are unofficial reports of two systems in China with higher performance [0], the arXiv paper listed below talks about a 40 million core system with around double theoretical performance than Frontier, and there's apparently a second system online with similar performance. I personally suspect that they didn't submit benchmarks to the top500 simply because those don't run well enoug…
It feels like it's been a long time since supercomputers were interesting. They're just oodles of identical processors connected together like legos. "We can afford more bricks than the next guy" is not exciting. When was the last time we had a "fastest supercomputer" that could do something the second-fastest couldn't also do?
https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...
Besides which, at that level the goal is not to go "look at this cool thing we built", it's more like "how do we cheaply and effectively build something that can solve these massive weather/nuclear explosion/human brain/etc. simulation problems we have?" and if ganging together lots of off-the-shelf CPUs/GPUs achieves that goal with less time, effort, and cost than building super-custom, boutique-schmoutique hardware, so be it.