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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

#81

Post by visarga »

adrian_b wrote: post #56
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 bes…

Computational speed is important, but more important is the data transfer speed. At least in ML. Is AMD the best for data transfer speed?

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#82

Post by gibolt »

jcranmer wrote: post #77
briffle wrote: post #71

What blows my mind is the newest NOAA super computer (that triples the speed of the last one) is a whopping 12 petaflops. It comes online this summer. It kind of shows the difference in priority spending, when nuclear labs get >1000 petaflop super computers, and the weather service (that helps with disasters that affect many Americans each year) gets a new one that is 1.2% of the speed. https://www.noaa.gov/media-rel…

The national labs aren't purely--or likely even mostly--dedicated to nuclear research. Instead, they cover a lot of the basic science research. These supercomputers will likely be used for projects like exploring cosmological models, or studying intramolecular interactions for chemical compounds, or fine-tuning predictions about properties of the top quark, etc.

Because these are so linked to research, everyone and their cousin is vying for time on them. Even though it may be massive, no individual will get anywhere near peak.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#84

Post by chomp »

irfn wrote: post #79
briffle wrote: post #71

What blows my mind is the newest NOAA super computer (that triples the speed of the last one) is a whopping 12 petaflops. It comes online this summer. It kind of shows the difference in priority spending, when nuclear labs get >1000 petaflop super computers, and the weather service (that helps with disasters that affect many Americans each year) gets a new one that is 1.2% of the speed. https://www.noaa.gov/media-rel…

I am curious as to what class of problems are being solved on these super computers. Also whats the abstraction of computation here. Is it a container :-t :-t :-t

Weather modeling - X kilometers by Y layers of atmosphere can get expensive to compute really quick. And NOAA does more than just simulate weather, they're running climate/sea level rise/arctic ice modelling, aggregating sensor data from buoys/balloons/satellites, processing maps, and more.

I can't speak for NOAA, but my experience with supercomputing has been that there is no abstraction of computation, your workload is very much tied to hardware assumptions.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#85

Post by timbargo »

photochemsyn wrote: post #64

I wonder if having one supercomputer with x number of chips or having eight supercomputers each with x/8 number of chips would be the more practical working setup. Weather forecasting for example is basically a complex probabilistic algorithm, and there's a notion that running eight models in parallel and then comparing and contrasting the results will give better estimates of actual outcomes than running one model o…

You can partition a large compute cluster into many smaller ones. Users can make a request specifying how many processors they want for how long. Check out this link to see the activity of a supercomputer at Argonne.

https://status.alcf.anl.gov/theta/activity

And I believe it is more efficient to have a single large cluster. As there are large overheard costs of power, cooling, and having a physical space to put the machine in. Plus a personnel cost to maintain the machines.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#86

Post by quanto »

Twirrim wrote: post #80
mulmen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a faster computer improve outcomes for victims of natural disaster? How much is left undiscovered about weather? Research spending is based on the potential for discovery. As a species we have studied weather since the beginning of time. How long have we been doing nuclear research? A century? Is there even an opportunity cost here? Or is it an economy of scale? As we build more supercomputers the costs go down…

> Would a faster computer improve outcomes for victims of natural disaster? How much is left undiscovered about weather? The US is way behind on weather modelling, in part due to lack of computing power available to do the grids at sufficiently small cells compared to Europe and other parts of the world. That means less accurate predictions and less advance notice of impending disasters, which means more risk of loss…

This is an interesting claim. Could you share a reputable source on your claim that the US weather prediction facility is behind its European counterparts? How does the US depend on Europe for weather predictions?

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#87

Post by Kuinox »

mulmen wrote: post #76
briffle wrote: post #71

What blows my mind is the newest NOAA super computer (that triples the speed of the last one) is a whopping 12 petaflops. It comes online this summer. It kind of shows the difference in priority spending, when nuclear labs get >1000 petaflop super computers, and the weather service (that helps with disasters that affect many Americans each year) gets a new one that is 1.2% of the speed. https://www.noaa.gov/media-rel…

Would a faster computer improve outcomes for victims of natural disaster? How much is left undiscovered about weather? Research spending is based on the potential for discovery. As a species we have studied weather since the beginning of time. How long have we been doing nuclear research? A century? Is there even an opportunity cost here? Or is it an economy of scale? As we build more supercomputers the costs go down…

> Erik P. DeBenedictis of Sandia National Laboratories has theorized that a zettaFLOPS (1021 or one sextillion FLOPS) computer is required to accomplish full weather modeling, which could cover a two-week time span accurately.[121][122][123] Such systems might be built around 2030.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#88

Post by cesarb »

moffkalast wrote: post #83

Now the real question: Can it run Crysis... without hardware acceleration?

> Can it run Crysis... without hardware acceleration?

I understand you are joking, but it's a legitimate benchmark, one which I've seen at least Anandtech using. For instance, a quick web search found an article from last year (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16478/64-cores-of-rendering-m...) which shows an AMD CPU (a Ryzen 9) running Crysis without hardware acceleration at 1080p at nearly 20 FPS. As that article says, it's hard to go much higher than that, due to limitations of the Crysis engine.

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#89

Post by ridgered4 »

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).

AMD and Nvidia were in talks to merge at one point, apparently the talks fell apart because Nvidia's CEO insisted on being the new CEO of the combined company and AMD would have none of that. So they purchased ATI instead, probably overpaid for it and probably pushed the bulldozer concepept to hard in an effort to prove it was worth it after all.

Nvidia actually used to develop chipsets for AMD processors include onboard GPUs, they did for Intel as well but they had a much more serious relationship with AMD in my estimation. This stopped with the ATI purchase since ATI is nvidia's main competitor the two companies stopped working together. Intel later killed all 3rd party chipset altogether and AMD had to do a lot of chipset work they weren't doing before.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if they had merged back then. I personally think a Jensen Huang run AMD would have done much better than AMD+ATI did in that era. I could easily see ATI having collapsed. What would the consoles use now? Would nvidia have been as aggressive as it has been without the strategic weakness of now controlling the platform it's products run on?

Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier

#90

Post by Const-me »

adrian_b wrote: post #56
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 bes…

> The former are useless for DP computations

Looking at “double-precision GFlops” columns there [1] they don’t seem terribly bad, more than twice as fast compared to similar nVidia chips [2]

While specialized extremely expensive GPUs from both vendors are way faster with many TFlops of FP64 compute throughput, I wouldn’t call high-end consumer GPUs useless for FP64 workloads.

The compute speed is not terribly bad, and due to some architectural features (ridiculously high RAM bandwidth, RAM latency hiding by switching threads) in my experience they can still deliver a large win compared to CPUs of comparable prices, even in FP64 tasks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_RX_6000_series#Desktop

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_30_series#GeForce_30_(...

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