China has two exaflop supercomputers. It's doubtful whether this is the world's most powerful supercomputer.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/10/26/china-has-already-re...
AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
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Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
#92What 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 nuclear lab computers are also rented out to anyone who applies for an XSEDE grant. Anyone with a successful grant gets free access (obviously limited to a reasonable core-hors). Anyway, a ton of university researchers, all the way from materials simulations to weather groups will be using this computer to run their codes, as they have done for the last ones too.
In fact, such use accounts for the vast majority of the compute use.
Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
#93How much of that performance will get undone by the software though? Either through AMD's lack of effort or Intel's compiler "sabotage".
Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
#94What 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.
I didn't know that, thank you for clarifying for me!
Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
#95What 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…
This is a weird take. There are so many things behind the scenes to say anything conclusively. Different compute loads, different problem domains, different accuracy and predictability requirements, etc.
Cynicism is unwarranted, but it fits the current zeitgeist, biases and feels good.
Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
#96Earlier 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…
I've heard that was the case with the old GFS model. They just updated the GFS model in 2021 to provide higher accuracy: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-upgrades-flagship-us....
I'm not entirely sure how it compared the ECMWF model during last years hurricane season, but I do think its improved substantially.
Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
#97Earlier 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).
Intel and AMD have a patent-licensing agreement where Intel licenses their x86 stuff to AMD, and AMD licenses their amd64 stuff to Intel. AFAIK, the moment AMD gets bought by another company, they can no longer use Intel's patents, and the moment that happens, Intel can no longer use AMD's patents. I'm not sure how much of x86/amd64 you can legally implement without infringing on any of these patents, but it might very well result in a really awkward situation.
Sure, the new owners could re-negotiate with Intel, and maybe nothing would change. But who knows? A combined AMD/nVidia might be a sufficient threat to Intel they might pull some desperate moves.
(In some timeline, this turns out to be the boost that makes RISC-V the new "standard" ISA, but I am not so optimistic it is the one we live in.)
Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
#98What 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…
> (..) when nuclear labs get >1000 petaflop super computers (..)
Would you prefer the research being performed based on empirical testing instead of running simulations?
Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 workloa…
In my experience it's very hard to write code for parallel compute workloads and I am guessing that half of the code written would be creating abstractions about that.
Re: AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, an…
SP is sixteen times the performance of DP here for no other reasons then market segmentation. Nvidia might have started that, but that's no reason not to call AMD out for it.