Good questions. I assumed there was ECC on HBM memory.

How will the LANL system add strong ECC and how much perf loss will occur due to that? This is a special concern since the article cites they have an interest in problems with random access patterns, which are awkward to pair with schemes based on separate checksums. Supercomputers are notoriously demanding on error correction and detection.

“Monte Carlo simulations, which use randomness to simulate what are actually deterministic processes”

Yes, it is pretty much used like that at Sandia and LANL, as a technique for uncertainty and sensitivity analysis in cases where parameters, driving forces, or initial conditions are known “imprecisely” in what are otherwise deterministic processes (say if a key model parameter’s value is known to be 4.57 ± 0.03). They also developed a Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) method and software to make such analyses more efficient (SAND2001-0417 at: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/806696/ ).

If HPC and making LANL happy was Intel’s objective, they obviously would have this. LANL has been asking for memory bandwidth ahead of flops for decades. The problem is they’re willing to spend hundreds of millions on these sorts of machines, but not tens of billions.
Can intel (or AMD) develop something like that for 2-3 customers?

It is about having more memory per core and much lower cost per memory bandwidth, I think.

Maybe Intel and AMD should have LPDDR5 Xeons and Epycs with a 16 or 24 memory controllers as an option? Or even 32 or 48 using Eliyan PHYs? How much work could a CPU with proper memory configuration with lots of vector and matrix engines do? I am gonna have a think about this….

I do believe that is what I said originally without being anywhere near as precise. Monte Carlo is a kind of magic as far as I am concerned. It is an approximation, and sometimes nature is perhaps a bit more precise than we are. But that you can take randomness and do predictions at all is the amazing thing.

Its PF/s 101 (15.6+85.8) could prove an interesting intro into heterogeneous gift delivery, seeing (for example) how a hopper full of Oh’Henri’s chocolate bars was the #1 Green500 favorite last year (yummy!). More to the point though, its targeted ability to efficiently graze through sparsely distributed North Pole tundra lichens should directly translate into great performance at dispatching christmas lumps of coal to the equally sparse naughty kids of the world! With 1.5x as many cores as Japan’s meteorological twins (PRIMEHPC FX1000), one may expect a top 20 or better 0.7 PF/s standing for this HPCG task, somewhat similar to the Wisteria’s Odyssey, but with a potential boost from the rocket engines of its matrix hoppers (helping it hop-along quicker!).

All in all a quite interesting animal, sure to be more power-thrifty than its upcoming Swiss cheese cousin from the Alps, itself better adpated to the dense grassy pastures found there (running at 445 PF/s in this ecosystem), but likely somewhat equivalent in sparse tundras (IMHO)! Cant’ wait to see its blinking red nose in the sky! 8^b