Supercomputing News and Discussions

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wjfox
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Re: Supercomputing News and Discussions

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rizarefaldi wrote: Wed Sep 01, 2021 3:08 am

slow down because covid?
No. The slowdown has been happening since 2013.
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Re: Supercomputing News and Discussions

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America’s First Exascale Supercomputer Is ‘On Track’ for 2021 Deployment

OCTOBER 5, 2021 12:51 PM ET

After years of preparation and a change of plans, the United States’ first exascale supercomputer will soon be in full function.

“Frontier is being installed now at Oak Ridge National Laboratory,” Morgan McCorkle, ORNL’s media relations manager confirmed on Monday.

Exascale systems are at the core of the next-generation of high performance supercomputing. They will be capable of operating at one quintillion calculations per second, which is immensely faster than most modern systems. Using them, researchers could process massive amounts of data and conduct potentially groundbreaking simulations spanning many fields at much more rapid rates. Such systems require a great deal of power and generate substantial heat. So, a new, more than two-mile power line recently had to be installed and other renovations had to be made to provide for roughly 40 megawatts of power and cooling for Frontier—before the massive machine’s components could even be staged on the floor of the Oak Ridge facility.

The Energy Department first announced aims to launch this Tennessee-based exascale system in 2019. It’s being produced in partnership with supercomputer manufacturer HPE Cray and chipmaker AMD via a contract award valued at around $600 million. Frontier will be capable of operating at more than 1.5 exaflops, and it’ll take up nearly two football fields worth of space.

“By solving calculations five times faster than today’s top supercomputers—exceeding a quintillion calculations per second—exascale systems like Frontier will enable scientists to develop new technologies for energy, medicine, and materials,” McCorkle told Nextgov.

https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2 ... nt/185860/
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Re: Supercomputing News and Discussions

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China may already have two exascale supercomputers

Report claims that the country is downplaying its supercomputing prowess

October 27, 2021

China may have already crossed the exascale barrier - twice.

The country is secretly operating the two most powerful supercomputers in the world, and is the first nation to run systems capable of more than one exaflops (1018 floating-point operations per second), The Next Platform reports.

[...]

Citing an anonymous source, TNP claim that The National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi is home to the Sunway “Oceanlite” supercomputer.

This system is a successor to the Sunway TaihuLight, officially China's most powerful supercomputer. In March, China tested Oceanlite to the Linpack benchmark and it hit 1.3 exaflops peak performance with 1.05 sustained performance, with a 35MW power consumption.

[...]

... could pale into insignificance when compared to an even more ambitious project TNP's source disclosed - China's 'Futures' program, which hopes to develop a 20 exaflops system by 2025.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/n ... computers/
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Re: Supercomputing News and Discussions

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wjfox wrote: Thu Oct 28, 2021 10:20 am China may already have two exascale supercomputers

Report claims that the country is downplaying its supercomputing prowess

October 27, 2021

China may have already crossed the exascale barrier - twice.

The country is secretly operating the two most powerful supercomputers in the world, and is the first nation to run systems capable of more than one exaflops (1018 floating-point operations per second), The Next Platform reports.

[...]

Citing an anonymous source, TNP claim that The National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi is home to the Sunway “Oceanlite” supercomputer.

This system is a successor to the Sunway TaihuLight, officially China's most powerful supercomputer. In March, China tested Oceanlite to the Linpack benchmark and it hit 1.3 exaflops peak performance with 1.05 sustained performance, with a 35MW power consumption.

[...]

... could pale into insignificance when compared to an even more ambitious project TNP's source disclosed - China's 'Futures' program, which hopes to develop a 20 exaflops system by 2025.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/n ... computers/
Concerning.
Coincidentally, I predicted that one possible sign of an early development of AGI would be increased secrecy in supercomputing and AI research. Most notably the sudden declaration that AI is a national state secret.
This due to the same thing occurring in World War 2 when the USSR noted that the USA suddenly stopped publishing any new research into nuclear science, realizing that it had been made into a national security issue for a most obvious reason.
Now I'm not saying China has an operational AGI or proto-AGI, only that it's probable that they now view high end computing as an issue of national security for some unknown reason. It's 10× as likely that they're seeking exascale in secret for simulated weapons testing and development.
Otherwise they'd have no reason to hide the development of exascale computing. It would only help their international standing and reignite optimism into the field under their leadership. Something else must be going on.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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As for how this was discovered
We have it on outstanding authority (under condition of anonymity) that LINPACK was run in March 2021 on the Sunway “Oceanlite” system, which is the follow-on to the #4-ranked Sunway TaihuLight machine. The results yielded 1.3 exaflops peak performance with 1.05 sustained performance in the ideal 35 megawatt power sweet spot.
...From what we can tell on these two exascale systems there are modest changes to architectures, doubling of chip elements and sockets. That is not to minimize the effort, but it we do not suspect new architectures emerging that can fit another coming bit of news, a so-called Futures program that aims to deliver a 20 exaflops supercomputer by 2025, according to our same source, who is based in the United States but in the know about happenings in China.
...And here’s another subtle detail. Our source confirms these LINPACK results for both of China’s exascale systems—the first in the world—were achieved in March 2021. When did the entity list appear citing Phytium and Sunway and the centers that host their showboat systems? In April 2021. The politics at play are strange and muddled. But our source, as close as can be to issues at hand, confirms China was first to exascale and with two separate machines based on two different (but fully Chinese native) architectures.
Chaillan? Who knows? Gwern also noted an obscure tweet while looking for discussion on the veracity of this: "Been to a conference at a super-computing center in China at June, got confirmation that one exascale supercomputer was already completed."
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NVIDIA to Build Earth-2 Supercomputer to See Our Future

November 12, 2021 by Jensen Huang

[...]

Climate simulations are configured today at 10- to 100-kilometer resolutions.

But greater resolution is needed to model changes in the global water cycle — water movement from the ocean, sea ice, land surface and groundwater through the atmosphere and clouds. Changes in this system lead to intensifying storms and droughts.

Meter-scale resolution is needed to simulate clouds that reflect sunlight back to space. Scientists estimate that these resolutions will demand millions to billions of times more computing power than what’s currently available. It would take decades to achieve that through the ordinary course of computing advances, which accelerate 10x every five years.

For the first time, we have the technology to do ultra-high-resolution climate modeling, to jump to lightspeed and predict changes in regional extreme weather decades out.

We can achieve million-x speedups by combining three technologies: GPU-accelerated computing; deep learning and breakthroughs in physics-informed neural networks; and AI supercomputers, along with vast quantities of observed and model data to learn from.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/11/1 ... rcomputer/


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Re: Supercomputing News and Discussions

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There are no greater bragging rights in supercomputing than those that come with top ten listing on the bi-annual list of the world’s most powerful systems—the Top 500. And there are no countries more inclined to throw themselves (and billions) into that competition this decade than the U.S. and China.

Today, the latest results were announced (much more on those here) but notably absent, aside from the expected first exascale machine in the U.S., “Frontier” at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S., are China’s results, which if published, would have shown two separate exascale-class machines.

This would have been a major mainstream news story had China decided to publicize its results–and on several fronts.
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Re: Supercomputing News and Discussions

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TOP500 SUPERCOMPUTERS: HUNGRY FOR THE EXASCALE FEAST
Let’s just cut right to the chase scene. The latest Top500 ranking of supercomputers, announced today at the SC21 supercomputing conference being held in St Louis, needed the excitement of an actual 1 exaflops sustained performance machine running the High Performance Linpack benchmark at 64-bit precision. And because the 1.5 exaflops “Frontier” system at Oak Ridge National Laboratories is apparently not fully built and the Chinese government is not submitting formal results for two exascale systems it has long since built and had running since this spring, we’re hungry.

Excitement is as vital of a component in supercomputing as any compute engine, interconnect, or application framework, and excitement is what competition in the industry is supposed to deliver aside from the ability to do more science and better science. We are emotional people, living during a global pandemic that may never go away, during what is supposed to be a shining week for supercomputing and socialization amongst its participants, and this is just not right.

So the November 2021 Top500 rankings are like leftovers a few days after Thanksgiving: You will eat them because they are food and you need sustenance, but you want something a little more exciting.
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Re: Supercomputing News and Discussions

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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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China unleashes might of AI on next-generation supercomputer to meet demand for more power

Sat, November 20, 2021, 9:30 AM

A powerful exascale supercomputer in China has made a massive increase in its artificial intelligence performance, according to a new study that says more advanced machines are being developed to meet demand for greater computing power.

Aided by a breakthrough in memory management technology, the New Generation Sunway supercomputer developed by the National Research Centre of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology recorded a 75,839-fold boost in handling data for machine learning. The overall performance of the computer increased 88 times when processing some of the most challenging AI-related tasks.

"Traditional supercomputers mainly serve scientific computing applications. Their support for machine learning, graph computing and big data processing is poor, limiting the application scenarios."

Using the new technology, the Sunway exascale machine "is running many AI applications, including large-scale machine learning and molecular dynamics simulation", they added.

An exascale computer can be 1,000 times more powerful than existing mainstream supercomputers. However, these machines are not just about speed.

Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-un ... 00724.html


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