
The U.S Just Beat China to develop the world's fastest supercomputer - Osiris30
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/technology/supercomputer-china-us.html
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TheRealPomax
How did this make it to the top 30... This "race" has been a global endeavour
since the 50's, and no one keeps the title because that's not how progress
works.

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davidmr
The rankings come out every June and November. They’re _always_ talked about
here because big computers are really cool.

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seanmcdirmid
I don’t think we ever talk about them here. The rankings are fairly irrelevant
to what most of us do, and the benchmarks used to derive them are too narrow
anyways.

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davidmr
I mean I don’t really want to argue about it because it seems like a silly
thing to argue about, but just because you aren’t interested doesn’t mean
nobody else is. Here’s a thread from the November list:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15707800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15707800)

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rdtsc
POWER9 CPUs! It's nice to see some competition in the area. If anything it at
least has a better security / firmware story if you don't feel like running an
embedded OS with backdoors in it
[https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-
tec...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-
technology/intel-amt-vulnerability-announcement.html) that give attacker
remote access

And it's almost affordable
[https://raptorcs.com/TALOSIILITE/](https://raptorcs.com/TALOSIILITE/) you
might think it's a joke but $1k does seem cheap compared to the prices for
motherboards in their main product.

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tntn
For some context, the U.S. foremost supercomputer up to now was Titan, which
had a theoretical peak of 27 petaflops at 8.2 MW.

Summit has significant higher peak performance at slightly higher power. It
also has significantly fewer nodes, with higher performance per node.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Thanks, was looking for this info in both the article and the HN comments.
It's not in the article, had to scroll halfway of the way down the comments to
find it.

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marban
_...is made up of rows of black refrigerator-size units that weigh a total of
340 tons._

A least _some_ things never change.

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kolpa
Form factors exist because they are local optima for non-computational
concerns (ergonomics, cooling, electric, hardware maintenance, etc). Computers
get better within the chosen form factors.

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maxxxxx
This "race" is starting to look like speed records for airplanes. There was a
time when this was interesting technologically but now it seems more about the
willingness to spend the money to get the record.

~~~
tntn
I sort of understand this sentiment, but Summit in particular is fascinating
technologically.

Half as many nodes as Titan, way higher power efficiency, NVLink2 interconnect
between CPU and GPU, ATS unified memory between all GPUs plus CPU, etc.

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AdmiralAsshat
Calling it a "race" is really strange. They're not trying to build the _first_
supercomputer, they're trying to build the _fastest_ / _most powerful_
supercomputer.

For instance, let's say China gets theirs out first, but the US releases one
several months later that is substantially more powerful. Did China win the
"race"? Or did the US?

~~~
itsame
I don't think calling it a race is all that strange. It's perhaps more strange
to talk about _winning_ the race or _beating_ another country though, as that
implies some finality/conclusion to the endeavor.

This can be looked at as a _continuous_ race to see who can build the highest-
throughput computer, where the competitors' positions in the race are decided
based on a well-defined set of benchmarks. The periodic updates don't indicate
who's _won_ \-- they're just a snapshot of what everyone's positions are in
the race around the time of publication. So it's more apt to say one
competitor is _ahead_ of another in the race, but talking about _winning_ or
_beating_ someone maybe gets more clicks.

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saganus
What kind of cores do machines of this caliber use?

I seem to recall that some years ago they used some Xeons and other "consumer-
level" processors, just with special interconnects and maybe even using
special versions, but they seemed like pretty close cousins to the regular
processors of a desktop.

Is this still the case? I see in the Top500 list that the Sunway TaihuLight
uses the Sunway SW26010 260C processors.

Are they fundamentally different than consumer-level processors? any special
architectures or other interesting parts? or are they pretty similar, just
built for massive interconnection and such?

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monocasa
Most of the time they care more about perf/watt than raw power. The problems
that run on these have to be so embarrassingly parallel that individual node
perf isn't that important. Sometimes those two line up well, but not always.
For instance Blue Gene used more or less off the shelf PowerPC 4xx cores that
were designed for embedded use cases. The neat stuff tends to be in the
supporting chipset, particularly around the interconnect.

In this case it's using more or less off the shelf POWER9s and Nvidia GPUs.

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piinbinary
It seems that we are not that far away from exascale supercomputers.

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davesque
Yeah, we GOT that China. _Dab._

But seriously though. Why does the news media seem to always feel the need to
push this narrative of nations being in competition with each other? It seems
so 20th century.

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foobaw
The narrative sucks but nations being competitive with each other is a pretty
powerful driving force for people.

I'm not sure about the U.S., but from my personal experience working in a
multi-national industry, and also being East Asian myself, patriotism is a
huge motivational factor, especially when it comes to beating "rival"
countries. (Prime example: Korea vs Japan).

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davesque
Yeah but it seems so artificial tho. What about doing things just for the sake
of doing them and because they're intrinsically cool and interesting? All the
nationalistic stuff is just made up and we've gotta let go of it eventually.
Why not now?

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JumpCrisscross
> _What about doing things just for the sake of doing them and because they
> 're intrinsically cool and interesting?_

This is how you get your budget cut. Competition forces tough decisions and
turns long-term strategic aims into near-term threats.

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kevcampb
The fact that this is news is the real story

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tntn
What? Summit had been in development for years, and is ridiculously efficient
for a machine with so much performance. It's a major milestone on the path to
exascale computing.

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adventured
An archaic premise these days.

Either Google or Amazon has the world's fastest supercomputer. The notion that
China ever led that, was beligerently fraudulent (only good for selling
sensationalism), it intentionally ignored that the nature of supercomputing
has completely changed over the last 20 years.

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tgamblin
In what sense? The ranking is still based on LINPACK scores, and it's intended
to represent the fastest machines for _scientific_ computing.

We can argue about whether modern simulation codes look like LINPACK (they
don't) but neither Google's nor Amazon's cloud is competitive for that type of
workload. Even if the clouds are physically bigger, nobody at Google or Amazon
is running really big _numerical_ jobs of the sort that DOE does. Many are
running smaller scale HPC and ML jobs, but it's expensive, and for latency-
bound physics simulations (most of what we run at LLNL, ORNL, etc.), cloud
networks will not perform at scale.

The question of whether China's machines ever performed well for big multi-
physics applications is up in the air, but they were certainly beating us on
LINPACK. The Chinese set out to show that they're serious about HPC, and I
think they accomplished at least that. I wouldn't be surprised if you saw this
race go back and forth a few times in the coming years.

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jcranmer
The problem with dense linear algebra as a metric of supercomputer performance
is that linear algebra tends to have relatively little communication compared
to the computation. This means that the architecture you can use to really
optimize linear algebra don't necessarily generalize well to different kinds
of HPC code. China's architectures have definitely been accused of this in the
past, but it looks like some of their newer stuff at least works fairly well
on more HPC code.

