Cray and AMD will build an exascale supercomputer for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory:
AMD today announced that it will partner with Cray to build Frontier, a supercomputer capable of "exascale" performance — one that can complete at least a quintillion floating point computations ("flops") per second, where a flop equals two 15-digit numbers multiplied together — for weather system simulation, subatomic particle modeling, and more. The two companies expect it will be the world's fastest supercomputer when it's delivered in 2021, with more than 1.5 exaflops of theoretical performance — roughly 50 times the speed of today's top supercomputers and faster than the top 160 combined. Frontier will be built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
[...] Driving Frontier's breakthrough compute is what AMD claims is the first "fully optimized" GPU and CPU design for supercomputing. It features a custom AMD Epyc processor packing a future Zen core architecture designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads, along with a graphics processing unit (GPU) in AMD's Radeon Instinct product lineup of server accelerators. The GPUs feature HPC engines, "extensive" mixed precision operations, and high-bandwidth memory, and they're linked together — one Epyc processor to four Instinct graphics cards — by AMD's Infinity Fabric and Cray Slingshot high-bandwidth system interconnect architectures.
Also at AnandTech and The Verge.
See also: AMD's Supercomputer Deal Is a 'Landmark Win' for Chip Maker, Analyst Says
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @09:09PM (6 children)
Massively parallel computers are so last century ... simply Piling Higher and Deeper, aka PhD.
Here is an area where theoretical computer science could shine, discover a general method to turn a sequential process problem into a parallel processing problem.
(Score: 2) by sshelton76 on Tuesday May 07 2019, @09:18PM (2 children)
That's a nice thought isn't it? But it would only be possible if P=NP and right now that doesn't appear to be the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem [wikipedia.org]
So that's the first step. Prove that P=NP
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @09:39PM (1 child)
It does, for N=1. Please send Fields Medal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08 2019, @05:32AM
Thats nothing I can do a proof in C for any random P
int P = rand();
int NP;
if(P = NP){
println("Proof Correct!");
}else{
println("Proof Failed!");
}
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 07 2019, @09:32PM (2 children)
They're just as important as ever, and they are being used for the new hotness, machine learning.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday May 07 2019, @09:41PM (1 child)
The new hotness is AI's creating photorealistic images of human beings.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08 2019, @01:47AM
15 quinitillion 8008135 per second!!!!