Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

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The most power efficient supercomputer currently on the Green 500 list is around 5GFLOPS/W, and it's a fairly small supercomputer. The only peta-level large system in top 10 is Piz Daint, which is around 3GFLOPS/W. So, we'll need to improve the power efficiency by about 6 times to make an exascale supercomputer within 60MW power envelope, which doesn't sound too difficult to achieve in 10 years. 30MW, on the other hand... the first Green 500 list and the latest one shows a 8 times improvement in ~7 years, but it's much more difficult to improve power efficiency these days.
 
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pcchen said:
but it's much more difficult to improve power efficiency these days.
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The low-hanging fruit seems to be largely eaten already. Next step - photonics maybe? All-optical I/O? Non-silicon (GaAs?) transistors perhaps?

Regardless, it will have to be chasing tiny small fractions of savings all over the place in a system for large aggregate savings in the final end. Maybe we've been too lazy so far, just reaping rewards without taking proper consideration for the conservation of our planet's resources? :p
 
Grall said:
The low-hanging fruit seems to be largely eaten already. Next step - photonics maybe? All-optical I/O? Non-silicon (GaAs?) transistors perhaps?

Regardless, it will have to be chasing tiny small fractions of savings all over the place in a system for large aggregate savings in the final end. Maybe we've been too lazy so far, just reaping rewards without taking proper consideration for the conservation of our planet's resources? :p
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Seems there's lots of room to innovate on the memory hierarchy front. Super fast nonvolatile memory is coming.
 
homerdog said:
Super fast nonvolatile memory is coming.
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You are thinking of that Intel/Micron announcement from a few days ago? That is interesting tech, but the memory isn't suitable for temporary/work data, as it will wear out with enough writes, and not that many writes either in the big scheme of things from what I understand...

I saw claims it was "1000x" more endurable than flash - that is current flash tech I have to assume, which is on the order of 1000 re-writes roughly, meaning this memory would last somewhere around a million writes. You could do a million writes to RAM in a fraction of a second today. Even if the flash memory being compared to lasts 5000 re-writes or 10000 or 100000, it makes little difference in the end. It's still no fragging good as working memory. :p

So we end up needing good ole DRAM anyway after all... With smart caching and some kind of wear leveling scheme backed by a really big DRAM cache, maybe non-volatile RAM could work out, I dunno. Computers tend to write A LOT to RAM (and supercomputers tend to use really big data sets); much more than they write to disk of course, which is why non-volatile memory makes sense as external storage. You probably wouldn't want your non-volatile RAM permanently soldered to the CPU substrate though; it would have to sit in some kind of - hot-swappable, preferably - modules off to the side.
 
Grall said:
You are thinking of that Intel/Micron announcement from a few days ago? That is interesting tech, but the memory isn't suitable for temporary/work data, as it will wear out with enough writes, and not that many writes either in the big scheme of things from what I understand...

I saw claims it was "1000x" more endurable than flash - that is current flash tech I have to assume, which is on the order of 1000 re-writes roughly, meaning this memory would last somewhere around a million writes. You could do a million writes to RAM in a fraction of a second today. Even if the flash memory being compared to lasts 5000 re-writes or 10000 or 100000, it makes little difference in the end. It's still no fragging good as working memory. :p

So we end up needing good ole DRAM anyway after all... With smart caching and some kind of wear leveling scheme backed by a really big DRAM cache, maybe non-volatile RAM could work out, I dunno. Computers tend to write A LOT to RAM (and supercomputers tend to use really big data sets); much more than they write to disk of course, which is why non-volatile memory makes sense as external storage. You probably wouldn't want your non-volatile RAM permanently soldered to the CPU substrate though; it would have to sit in some kind of - hot-swappable, preferably - modules off to the side.
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I know all that, and it might not be the Intel/Micron thing but it is coming in one form or another. Still I think DRAM or something like it will be necessary.

On another note, memory bandwidth is also about to explode by an order of magnitude. This could change the way we think about many HPC problems. All in all, there are many reasons why a 6x increase in perf/W is reasonable in 10 years.
 
This probably deserves its own thread too, but I'm guessing AMD will at least try to be in this race:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/arti...umber=7155462&filter=AND(p_IS_Number:5210076)

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The article claims that each EHP node can provide "10 TFLOPS or more" of sustained throughput. 100 000 EHP nodes would result in 1 Exaflop.
 
Summit will perform 5-10 times faster than TItan .... 2018 debut.

Faster supercomputers are key to the development of technologies such as fusion power. Each so called pre-exascale system will deliver at least 100 petaflops of computing performance. One — the Summit system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, designed for open science — is expected to be 150 petaflops. That’s more than three times the peak speed of today’s fastest supercomputer.
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory's "Summit" and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's "Sierra" will use NVIDIA® Tesla® GPU accelerators and NVIDIA NVLink™ high-speed interconnect technology on next-generation IBM POWER servers. When they go live, each will be significantly faster than today's fastest supercomputer, achieving between 100 to 300 petaflops of peak performance.
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http://www.nvidia.com/object/exascale-supercomputing.html

https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/
 
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President using his executive authority to build himself the best gaming rig in the world. I like it. He'll surely be able to frag (do people even say that anymore?) noobs in Unreal Tournament 4 at 5000fps.
 
China builds world's most powerful computer

The 93 petaflop Sunway TaihuLight is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi.
At its peak, the computer can perform around 93,000 trillion calculations per second. It is twice as fast and three times as efficient as the previous leader Tianhe-2, also from China, said Top500 which released the new list on Monday.

The US has four supercomputers in the top 10 of the Top500 list, while China has two which currently occupy the top two places. The other positions in the top 10, published twice a year, are occupied by machines from Japan, Switzerland, Germany and Saudi Arabia.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36575947
 
Ah. Very light on the specs. I goggled a little bit, found some more, but only down to the basic block overview of the processors, pretty much. One wonders what architecture the cores themselves are based on, previous chinese homegrown chips have been PowerPC based, or was it MIPS? Can't remember.

One wonders if it's not something similar now as well, modifying an existing licensed or 'borrowed' design; creating an entirely novel chip architecture and then making a world-class supercomputer out of it is a very big step to take all in one go... (I guess that's why they call it a "step", lol...)
 
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