21 ms·
ORNL’s Frontier breaks the exaflop ceiling
- davidmr 4y agoAt the time of the last list, there were two systems in China that had recently broken this barrier, but their owners have chosen not to submit benchmarks to the Top500.
- arcanus 4y ago> there were two systems in China that had recently broken this barrier Allegedly broken this barrier. There is a reason that science is conducted in the open, in a reproducible and traceable manner. Those systems might not function properly at scale, or might not have run at an exaflop in double precision compute. Frontier is certainly the first publicly verified system to achieve Exascale on the internationally accepted standard measurement.
- throwaway4good 4y agoI suppose we can discuss what the source of the souring of scientific coorperation is. But it does appear that China has at least two computers that are faster than its current best performing entry on the top 500. And that basically invalidates the list.
- 0des 4y agoChina has a lot of things that invalidate common knowledge but that doesn't mean it is real, reproducable, or novel. There is a reason why scrutiny exists.
- muxr 4y agoThere is also an article about how they did submit a score from one of these Chinese "exaflop" systems, for a different benchmark and it turns out it can only achieve the claimed performance at half precision: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-exascale-supercomputers-hoax https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-exascale-supercomp...
- throwaway4good 4y agoWhich would still make it faster than previous number one machine, no?
- freemint 4y agoMaybe not. Fugaku also had super exa scale performance at reduced precision
- JonChesterfield 4y agotop500.org is down. That seems unnecessary. Was going to say that it's always great to see GPU machines performing well. Looking forward to seeing how far off theoretical peak the benchmark hit.
- throwaway4good 4y agoThey should have hosted it on a more powerful computer ...
- SMAAART 4y agohttps://archive.ph/EEw1x#selection-1515.0-1518.0 https://archive.ph/EEw1x#selection-1515.0-1518.0
- ckastner 4y agoThis filled me with nostalgia. I remember how excited I was -- maybe even in awe -- when, in 2008, IBM's Roadrunner broke the PetaFLOPS barrier and was the first computer to do so. That's not even that long ago.
- saltcured 4y agoHa, my memory is how tera-scale was the motivating target for all the high-performance research when I was in college. If I stop to think about it, it still seems dissonant to think that a random gamer's GPU has more power than that now.
- Aardwolf 4y agoApparently the first petaflops computer was Roadrunner in 2008 [1] So the supercomputer speed went 1000x from 2008-2022. But home computer speeds definitely did not go up that much, it was maybe around 10x. Does this mean there is more potential for home computers in the future? Of course the supercomputers are massively parallel, but it's not like they got a 100x times larger building, or do they? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunner_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunner_(supercomputer)
- Retric 4y agoHome GPU’s have gotten more than a 10x boost from 2008 to 2022 and current supercomputers are much more expensive than those from 2008. A 9800 GTX from March 2008 had 432.1 GFLOPS 32FP. A 3060 GTX from February 2021 is at a similar price point and 12.74 TFLOPS 32FP. A 3090 Ti is 40 TFLOPS 32FP or 100x the performance of the 9800 GTX.
- Aardwolf 4y agoThe GPU's aren't helping compile code 100x faster or having a 100x faster boot time, so would it be fair to say the 1000x speed increase of the exaflop supercomputers is also mainly for specialized workloads like matrix multiplications, but it wouldn't be 1000x faster than Roadrunner for general purpose computation? how much faster would it be at SAT solving?
- freemint 4y ago> how much faster would it be at SAT solving? With modern SAT solvers or with historic (single threaded) SAT solvers?
- Aardwolf 4y agoNow that I think of it, maybe I should have given Argon2 hashing instead of SAT as an example. Argon2 hashing is designed to benefit as little as possible from parallel GPU computations.
- ketanmaheshwari 4y agoMore info about Frontier here: https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/ https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/
- thenoblesunfish 4y agoAnyone less familiar with the field should be aware that it’s widely known that the benchmark used for this list (multiplying two huge dense matrices) is not representative of many real use cases in scientific computing. So while it’s fun to push this one number higher, one has to ask if it’s really worth the incredible amount of money involved, when it’s something of a drag race.
- JonChesterfield 4y agoFortunately the hardware can do other calculations as well
- dragontamer 4y agoORNL is not an entity who builds supercomputers just for giggles. Department of Energy has plenty of practical, and top secret (nuclear) programs to fund, and these kinds of computers are fundamental to sustaining the nuclear edge for the US Government. Among other scientific purposes of course. But the 'quiet part' is that a lot of this comes down to simulated nukes. (Much like how the space program was really a nuke delivery project) These computers remain useful for other physics simulations of course: atom to atom interactions, protein folding, weather modeling. So they also serve the scientific community.
- maliker 4y ago21 Megawatts of power to run at full capacity. Wow! About the same power consumption as 16,000 homes. I’m not saying it’s a bad use of power, just that it’s impressive.