Anyone know the reason for the dominance of Power processors in the top 10 other than it's from IBM and they get a lot of contracts for HPC?
Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
81–90 of 220 posts
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#82Really wish Fujitsu sold a developer kit with an A64fx chip - its the only shipping ARM chip with SVE that I know of and I would love to get my hands on one to play with.
I'm pretty sure there's an emulator, which is how you usually do early development.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#83Given 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…
Get ready for a surprise then: all those FLOPS are coming from the ARM cores.... This beast has no GPUs: https://postk-web.r-ccs.riken.jp/spec.html
It looks like this is not an ARM core, but a Fujitsu implementation of the Arm v8-A instruction set and Fujitsu-developed Scaleable Vector Extension. Most likely the latter is doing all the heavy lifting.
https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-re...
>A64FX is the world's first CPU to adopt the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), an extension of Armv8-A instruction set architecture for supercomputers. Building on over 60 years' worth of Fujitsu-developed microarchitecture, this chip offers peak performance of over 2.7 TFLOPS, demonstrating superior HPC and AI performance.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#84CoreTeks on youtube has a great video that explains the brilliance of this chip.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#85I can't help but think that the top minds from Cyrix aren't feeling both smug at the vindication and dismayed that they were just a little too ahead of the curve. The writing was on the wall that RISC would win, but the x86 juggernaut appeared unbeatable.
I remember Cyrix as just releasing Intel compatible/clone chips, am I misremembering something?
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#86There's something amusing about a blog post announcing the fastest computer in the world being unable to serve up web requests in under 10 seconds.
(When I wrote this comment, I was seeing 500 status code errors when trying to load the page)
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get ready for a surprise then: all those FLOPS are coming from the ARM cores.... This beast has no GPUs: https://postk-web.r-ccs.riken.jp/spec.html
So looking at anandtech's breakdown the CPUs are closer to a knights landing 'CPU/GPU' than a traditional CPU (currently). They also have a ton of HBM2 right next to the dies so this should be insanely fast as they can feed those cores very very quickly regardless of how fast each core is by clock and pipeline. That should massively reduce stalls.
As an early user of KNL, I don't get the "GPU" bit. KNL runs normal x86_64 code and doesn't look that much different to the AMD Interlagos systems I once used apart from the memory architecture.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get ready for a surprise then: all those FLOPS are coming from the ARM cores.... This beast has no GPUs: https://postk-web.r-ccs.riken.jp/spec.html
That's pretty cool! That probably means that applications will have an easier time. Looks like it has 512-bit SIMD. I wonder what BLAS they are using, and if the contributions are open sourced.
(SVE isn't 512-bit SIMD like AVX512.)
I don't know what BLAS they're using, though I know they've long worked on their own, but BLIS has gained SVE support recently, for what it's worth.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s your stack, and how much traffic?
I survived without errors from being to HN front page with Nginx and a static site (made with Hugo, iirc) on a Linode 1GB (when the plan was still existing). No CDN whatsoever.
That sounds reasonable to me. In the old days people used Apache because it was available and worked. But because the performance was shit they adopted other complex means of dealing with heavy loads. Nginx has dramatically improved the web server performance problem but a lot of old practices are still in place.
Re: Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
#90I 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.
> Imagine if Apple were to announce a Mac utilise the exact same chip.
This seems unlikely unless Apple has decided to sell their chips for the first time ever.
I suppose it could be interesting from Apple's PR perspective, but I have serious doubts that the supercomputer owner would agree to this. What happens to them when Apple discontinues the current chip in favor of the next one?