61–70 of 72 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Widebody airliners aren't doing much for the climate, either.
While true, I think the point is more about how minuscule 21 MW is when considered in isolation — 0.001 percent of global electricity usage.
This is exciting news! What's also exciting is that it's not just C++ that can run on this supercomputer; there is also good (currently unofficial) support for programming those GPUs from Julia, via the AMDGPU.jl library (note: I am the author/maintainer of this library). Some of our users have been able to run AMDGPU.jl's testsuite on the Crusher test system (which is an attached testing system with the same hardwar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Power efficiency mostly. The power requirements of an exascale machine with 2010-timeframe hardware would be crazy.
Oak Ridge still consumes 20 megawatts. However older technology was appearing to require a gigawatt.
Back in the 2010 timeframe, there were articles about how an Exascale Supercomputers might be impossible. Would be interesting if someone could go back and assess where those predictions were wrong and where they held, and how the architecture changed to get around those true scaling limits.
This was a governmental report on the challenges of Exascale. Contributors included major universities and all the US supercomputing facilities. It wasn’t that they overlooked the possibility of Moore’s law continuing and associated power reduction.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Using the secret skill of "clicking on the links for the other lists" I discovered that the first TOP500 which had a machine report a power draw was the TOP10 in November 1996: https://top500.org/lists/top500/1996/11/ (498 kW for 229 GFlops. 136,317 times more power draw per flops than the current leader on the Green500.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While true, I think the point is more about how minuscule 21 MW is when considered in isolation — 0.001 percent of global electricity usage.
In other news, only 100,000 of these would match the whole world's power draw.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oak Ridge still consumes 20 megawatts. However older technology was appearing to require a gigawatt.
That really helps me appreciate the power efficiency gains! So much improvement in so short time...
Back in the 2010 timeframe, there were articles about how an Exascale Supercomputers might be impossible. Would be interesting if someone could go back and assess where those predictions were wrong and where they held, and how the architecture changed to get around those true scaling limits.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-113hhrg81195/pdf/CH... This was a governmental report on the challenges of Exascale. Contributors included major universities and all the US supercomputing facilities. It wasn’t that they overlooked the possibility of Moore’s law continuing and associated power reduction.
Just found the article which explains the gains. Mostly GPU. A billion processors doing a billion fips each.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Widebody airliners aren't doing much for the climate, either.
While true, I think the point is more about how minuscule 21 MW is when considered in isolation — 0.001 percent of global electricity usage.