Comments on: Aurora Rising: A Massive Machine For HPC And AI

By: hoohoo

hoohoo — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 03:49:11 +0000

“Smile, Rick. It’s almost over…”

Love your writing, Timothy.

By: q^8

q^8 — Thu, 25 May 2023 08:58:00 +0000

In reply to EC.

Pretty right. But as long as your skunkworks engineering team gave you “effort beyond”, it would be tech suicide to lay them off, and so I think that this “big red reset button” is mostly a “pause actuator” here. Given where Intel was on this 5 years ago, the progress is very impressive! — even if it does not yet match the competition, it is now very close…

By: EC

EC — Wed, 24 May 2023 19:44:34 +0000

>>What Argonne is actually getting is a Ponte Vecchio GPU rated at 31.5 teraflops, which is 61 percent of the peak performance of a standalone GPU<<

. . . and now it's clear why the big red reset button on the GPU group was punched.

By: DRB

DRB — Wed, 24 May 2023 01:40:58 +0000

Having worked on the successful but ill-fated Blue Waters proposal, the performance promised is impressive. But the price is stunning!

By: HuMo

HuMo — Wed, 24 May 2023 01:06:44 +0000

Well, Intel sure had a lot of ‘splainin to do for being such a pants-down no-show at the June List partyxtravaganza and mega-battle-royale, all the way from the beer-garden capital of the world, where three liters of the good stuff are considered a proper meal, Munich … oh wait …! This prebriefing by McVeigh puts things in perspective to be sure … a better machine, 8 years in the making, at lower cost …

Still, with Aurora tied-up, lacing-in the back of its wedding dress, couldn’t they have sent Sunspot to the ring, as a stand-in replacement, for pre-rehearsal purposes of exhibition, a presence of evidence if you will? At 1/100th the size of Aurora, with the very same configuration, it should still punch 20 PF/s, placing it at #40 in HPL in this very June’s List, if only to reassure bookies.

Maybe it’s that fine-tuned software libraries issue, rearing its ugly street-urchin head again, to remind all contemporary programmers that just because compilers exist, for your unlikely language of choice, doesn’t mean you’ll get any decent performance from your specific hardware, when running the resulting binary on it, unless your libraries are indeed particularly well-tuned to it. Acne, shmacne, but if I had to bet, say 10-to-1, I’d say the libraries (their tuning) are the current hold-up (and hopefully the last).

By: Eric Olson

Eric Olson — Wed, 24 May 2023 00:55:07 +0000

With a 2 exaflop system it will be interesting to know what percentage of cycles are consumed by capability class jobs that, for example, parallelize to more than 10 percent of Aurora’s total capacity during a run.

Hopefully the final effect is not too many nodes with too many uncorrectable ECC faults and a slow network.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 23 May 2023 23:38:57 +0000

25% of the blades do not contain the final revision of the Sapphire Rapids silicon (as reported here: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-delivers-10000-aurora-supercomputer-blades-benchmarks-against-nvidia-and-amd).