El Capitan Supercomputer Detailed: AMD CPUs & GPUs To Drive 2 Exaflops of Compute
This afternoon the DOE and HPE are announcing the architectural details of the [El Capitan] supercomputer, revealing that AMD will be providing both the CPUs and accelerators (GPUs), as well as revising the performance estimate for the supercomputer. Already expected to be the fastest of the US's exascale systems, El Capitan was originally commissioned as a 1.5 exaflop system seven months ago. However thanks to some late configuration changes, the DOE now expects the system to reach 2 exaflops once it's fully installed, which would cement its place at the top of the US's supercomputer inventory.
Overall, El Capitan is the second (and apparently final) system being built as part of the US DOE's CORAL-2 program for supercomputers. Like the similar Frontier system, El Capitan comes with a $600 million price tag and is intended to ensure the US's leadership in supercomputers in the exascale era. LLNL will be using the system to replace Sierra, their current IBM Power 9 + NVIDIA Volta supercomputer. All told, El Capitan will be 16 times more powerful than the system it replaces. LLNL will be using it primary for nuclear weapons modeling – substituting for actual weapon testing – while the system will also see secondary use as a research system in other fields, particularly those where machine learning can be applied.
[...] On the CPU side of matters, AMD will be supplying a standard version of their Zen 4-based "Genoa" EPYC processor. As it's still two generations out from AMD's current wares, the amount of information on Zen 4/Genoa is limited, but AMD is promising support for next-generation memory, Infinity Fabric 3, as well as broad promises of both single and multi-threaded performance leadership. Notably, this is a greater level of detail on the CPU than we currently have for Frontier, which is using an unspecified and customized next-generation EPYC CPU.
See also: AMD's CPU-to-GPU Infinity Fabric Detailed
Also at Wccftech.
Previously:
Cray and AMD Will Build a 1.5 Exaflops Supercomputer by 2021
June 2019 TOP500 List: All 500 Systems Above 1 Petaflops
Related Stories
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
TOP500 Becomes a Petaflop Club for Supercomputers
The 53rd edition of the TOP500 marks a milestone in the 26-year history of the list. For the first time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop or more on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to the list now at 1.022 petaflops.
The top of the list remains largely unchanged, with only two new entries in the top 10, one of which was an existing system that was upgraded with additional capacity.
Two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, installed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, respectively, retain the first two positions on the list. Both derive their computational power from Power 9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs. The Summit system slightly improved its HPL result from six months ago, delivering a record 148.6 petaflops, while the number two Sierra system remains unchanged at 94.6 petaflops.
The #100 system is at 2.3957 petaflops, up from 1.9661 petaflops in November 2018. The #500 system was at 0.8748 petaflops in November.
Complete list. The leading Green500 system is still "Shoubu system B" at 17.604 gigaflops per Watt.
Previously: Latest Top500 List: Upgraded US Supercomputers Claim Top Two Spots; China has Most Systems
AMD revealed a number of details about its upcoming CPUs and GPUs at its Financial Analyst Day 2020:
AMD Shipped 260 Million Zen Cores by 2020
AMD Discusses 'X3D' Die Stacking and Packaging for Future Products: Hybrid 2.5D and 3D
AMD Moves From Infinity Fabric to Infinity Architecture: Connecting Everything to Everything
AMD Unveils CDNA GPU Architecture: A Dedicated GPU Architecture for Data Centers
AMD's 2020-2022 Client GPU Roadmap: RDNA 3 & Navi 3X On the Horizon With More Perf & Efficiency
AMD's RDNA 2 Gets A Codename: "Navi 2X" Comes This Year With 50% Improved Perf-Per-Watt
Updated AMD Ryzen and EPYC CPU Roadmaps March 2020: Milan, Genoa, and Vermeer
AMD Clarifies Comments on 7nm / 7nm+ for Future Products: EUV Not Specified[...] The big focus here (though far from sole) is on the data center market. Long the breadbasket of Intel and increasingly NVIDIA as well, it's a highly profitable market that continues to grow. And it's a market that slipped away from AMD, and which they're now clawing back on the strength of their EPYC processors. Over the next 5 years AMD wants to take a much bigger piece of the total data center pie, and in fact the company expects to cross 10% market share of data center CPUs this next quarter. Which, by our reckoning, would be the first time they've hit that kind of market share in a decade (if not more), showing just how much things have changed for AMD.
[...] Along with great GPU performance, the other big upgrade for the CDNA family is incorporating AMD's Infinity Architecture (née Infinity Fabric). Already extensively used in AMD's EYPC CPUs, the interconnect technology is coming to AMD's GPUs, where it will play a part both in AMD's multi-GPU efforts, as well as AMD's grander plans for heterogeneous computing. With the third generation of the technology scheduled to offer full CPU/GPU coherency, allowing for a single unified memory space, the Infinity Architecture will be how AMD leverages both their CPU and GPU architectures to secure even bigger wins by using them together.
[...] After playing second-fiddle to NVIDIA for the past few years in terms of the performance of their top GPUs, AMD is planning to offer video cards with top-tier performance, capable of delivering "uncompromising" 4K gaming. AMD's rivals won't be standing still, of course, but AMD believes they have the technology and the energy efficiency needed to deliver the extreme performance that enthusiasts are looking for.
AMD will use an improved TSMC "7nm" process node for Zen 3 CPUs, but is unlikely to use the "N7+" node which relies on extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). Zen 4 CPUs will be made on a TSMC "5nm" process.
Upcoming RDNA 2 GPUs are confirmed to include features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading.
Related: U.S. Department of Energy's "El Capitan" Supercomputer Will Reach 2 Exaflops Using AMD CPUs and GPUs
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @07:53PM
Your wives are cheating on you with NIGGERS. Ooga Booga!
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday March 05 2020, @07:57PM (7 children)
This one supercomputer cost more than the entire fusion energy research budget for the US, all projects put together.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 05 2020, @08:29PM (6 children)
H-bombs are quite energetic.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday March 05 2020, @08:35PM (5 children)
I just like to keep score in the useful for the future of the country vs useful for killing people game.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:33PM (4 children)
>> implying mutual exclusivity
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:34PM (3 children)
You know, you go back 100 years, you might genuinely find some instances of that not being true.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday March 06 2020, @04:49PM (2 children)
Wait, such as TNT? Muzzle load rifles? What are you getting at? How about Gatling Guns? Grapeshot / Chain shot? Cannons in general? Arsenic? Bio Warfare? Mustard Gas? I'm confused as to what you're trying to get at?
Are you implying that there were never or that there were some instances of mutual exclusivity?
The fact is that there are examples of technology that was strictly developed for warfare and really isn't useful for anything else. I would say throughout history there are many examples of that. Then again, those might be able to be justified as deviations from the norm that is the progression of technology. Sure, Mustard Gas was a horrible thing as are nerve agents, etc. Yet, those were made possible by the increase in knowledge of how our world works and the progression of technology.
Raise your hand, if you want to go back to a world without Air Conditioning, Running Water, Indoor Plumbing, Refrigerators, etc. There's nothing stopping you from living your dream. You might have to be bothered by the occasional airplane flying overhead or the like, though.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday March 06 2020, @05:01PM (1 child)
That we were using those horrible weapons for necessary survival against hostile powers, instead of getting some dumb rich fucks a little richer or feeling threatened by Asian peasants overthrowing their dictatorship.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday March 06 2020, @06:32PM
Yeah, no we've always done that. The USA has just been slightly less worse than those before it. Then again, maybe more of a different story same tune. Due to the ease of access to information is why you're hearing about all the troubles and all the little nuances about Kim Kardashian's latest outfit. The information age has made the world much smaller. Newspapers / News Stations / Media are just like they always have been, trying to make a buck. Sure, some news sources were better than others, but sex, politics, death, etc. sells papers. You won't sell all that many newspapers, if you're reporting on all the good, happy things that happened in the world today. Yay, grandma didn't get run over by a Raindeer . . .
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by corey on Thursday March 05 2020, @08:39PM (4 children)
I always find it fascinating that the US Department of Energy is responsible for nukes and their development. With that name, you'd think their remit would be limited to production and distribution of gas and electricity.
Energy, used for destroying other countries.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday March 05 2020, @08:50PM (2 children)
You'd also think the departman of defense wouldn't be involved in invading other countries, the department of education wouldn't be responsible mostly for shutting down schools, the department of justice wasn't responsible for major injustices.
Newspeak is quite normal for american governance.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:23PM (1 child)
The Department of Defence used to be known as the War Department. War is bad, but defence is good, I suppose.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:29PM
It was aspirational at the time "Wow, WW2 really sucked, what if we had a new world order where we didn't invade each other and made peace by preparing for war" But that has proven to be pure Orwellianism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:18PM
The US Department of Entropy is responsible for cleansing other countries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:32PM (1 child)
Just powerful enough to boot the next release of systemd...
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:37PM
I don't think you "get" the complaints about systemd.