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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: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday May 07 2019, @10:55PM (2 children)
Rather than a 30k people town in Tenessee, they should build those near a million-people town in WI, MN, WA, or northern IL, and use the massive output to provide heating to the town, or for some industrial/chemical application.
There is not reason to limit a computer to 60 or 100 MW, as long as you use the exhaust for something useful. Top-secret bits don't leak.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 07 2019, @11:10PM (1 child)
If you make it too big, you might hold onto it for too long and be stuck with an inefficient and expensive supercomputer. There are some technologies on the horizon that will likely slash power consumption by at least an order of magnitude. We'll eventually see a 1 exaflops system with 1 MW or lower power consumption.
The smaller systems near the top of the Green500 list [top500.org] should be the ideal, as long as you are getting the amount of performance you require. If you want that full 1 exaflops in the early 2020s, fine, but you probably shouldn't shoot for 4 exaflops if the system will end up consuming nearly 100 MW.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08 2019, @01:45AM
That's why I never start anything. If I start it later, I'll be older and wiser and will finish it quicker.