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posted by martyb on Thursday February 13 2020, @10:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the rainmakers dept.

Second GPU Cloudburst Experiment Yields New Findings

In late 2019, researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) caught the attention of the high-performance computing community and top commercial cloud providers by successfully completing a bold experiment that marshalled all globally available-for-sale GPUs (graphics processing units) for a brief run which proved it is possible to elastically burst to very large scales of GPUs using the cloud, even in this pre-exascale era of computing.

[...] Fast forward to early February 4, 2020, when the same research team conducted a second experiment with a fraction of the remaining funding left over from a modest National Science Foundation EAGER grant.

[...] "We drew several key conclusions from this second demonstration," said SDSC's Sfiligoi. "We showed that the cloudburst run can actually be sustained during an entire workday instead of just one or two hours, and have moreover measured the cost of using only the two most cost-effective cloud instances for each cloud provider."

The team managed to reach and sustain a plateau of about 15,000 GPUs, or 170 PFLOP32s (i.e. fp32 PFLOPS[*]) using the peak fp32 FLOPS provided by NVIDIA specs. The cloud instances were provisioned from all major geographical areas, and the total integrated compute time was just over one fp32 exaFLOP[*] hour. The total cost of the cloud run was roughly $60,000.

[*] fp32 (floating point, 32-bit operands aka single precision)
FLOPS: Floating-point OPerations per Second
PFLOPS; Petaflops 1015 (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000,000) floating point operations per second.
exaFLOPS; 1018 (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) floating point operations per second.

Disclaimer: The original story was apparently submitted by a participant in the research.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:18PM (6 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:18PM (#957713) Journal

    In the second experiment, which was about eight hours long versus less than two hours in the first experiment, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory processed some 151,000 jobs, up from about 101,000 in the first burst.

    “This means that the second IceCube cloud run produced 50% more science, even though the peak was significantly lower,” explained Sfiligoi, who also noted that the latter experiment added OSG, XSEDE, and PRP’s Kubernetes resources, effectively making it a hybrid-cloud setup unlike the first time, when it was purely cloud-based.

    No wasted electrons.

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  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:05PM (5 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:05PM (#957765) Journal

    How many watts were consumed in that eight hours?

    How many watts per FLOP?

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    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:23PM (4 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:23PM (#957769) Journal

      I'm just gonna be lazy and say:

      1.46 megawatts (42 gigajoules consumed, or 10 tons of TNT)

      9 picowatts

      Are those right? Probably not. But they sound good.

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      • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:32PM (3 children)

        by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:32PM (#957771) Journal

        I am disappointed that this is not a subject of interest. A lot of power is being used to produce something hardly more useful than determining somebody's price/earnings ratios.

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        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:34PM (1 child)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:34PM (#957772) Journal
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          • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 13 2020, @06:21PM

            by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday February 13 2020, @06:21PM (#957788) Journal

            Well, if it can cook minute rice in 15 seconds, I'm all for it.

            They're still using a hell of a lot of juice.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @07:58AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @07:58AM (#958117)
          Oh, I dunno, analysing the behaviour of neutrinos is I think a worthy use of that energy. Getting a small step closer to unlocking the mysteries of the universe is a wonderful goal in my book, and its sad to see you value it on the level of analysing market valuations.