10 ms·

The truth is, US Super-Computer spending is hard to justify and most of the owners of these in various national institutes are shopping for customers to justify

by dkural 10y ago

The truth is, US Super-Computer spending is hard to justify and most of the owners of these in various national institutes are shopping for customers to justify their funding, although their set-up is not a good fit for many types of computing. Every dollar spent on building these computers is a dollar NOT spent in the budget of a research-driven grant. Give these dollars to physicists, mathematicians, genomics scientists, chemists, climate people etc. This way the demand in computing will dictate the type of systems built. p.s. I've attended the event in person that's listed in the article hosted by the OSTP, which is a part of the White House (National Strategic Computing Initiative). My conclusion was most of these computers aren't needed and a misdirection of funds to the tune of billions of dollars that computing / scientific computing could really benefit from in other ways.

batbomb 10y ago
Yep. I'm part of a significant project which is being shoehorned into a Cray because the government has already spent the money for it. If it's not an MPI job, it's going to be painful.
- gbrown_ 10y ago
  > If it's not an MPI job, it's going to be painful. What are you using for communication between nodes? To make the tone clear I'm genuinely interested as I'm not sure what running on a Cray prevents you from doing?
  - batbomb 10y ago
    That's the problem: We don't need to communicate between the nodes; We don't need MPI. We need distributed databases and we might need Spark. We need machine learning. We need servers. We would like availability and reliability. We get full batch nodes that are relatively anemic in memory for our workload (4GB/core) for a maximum of 24 hours at a time.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - gbrown_ 10y ago
      Aha thanks! Yes I agree with you points here, not an ideal workload for a Cray system.
    - ams6110 10y ago
      Basically it's hard to use a Cray node as a stand-alone server. Yes it runs linux, but it has no storage, no external network. There is the so-called cluster compatibility mode but bottom line everything is a scheduled batch job in a very walled garden.
      - crznp 10y ago
        Cray invests a lot in their interconnect; if you aren't using it, there is little reason to be on a Cray. Which just emphasizes the point that most applications would be better served by cheaper, more resilient hardware.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        ams6110 10y ago
        All the stranger that they sold their interconnect technology, arguably their "secret sauce" to Intel. Without the interconnect, they are just a bunch of (very high quality) diskless x86 systems. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1261622 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1261622
    - nickbauman 10y ago
      > We don't need to communicate between the nodes Huh. At the core of almost every problem I've ever encountered in my 20+ year career programming that I would consider "interesting" is the need to allocate work across many compute nodes that have some amount of shared state. You could just as well take A* as a baseline for these types of problems. Your typical cloud computing infra/design is not a good match for these.
StreamBright 10y ago
Is this based on how US spends money or generally speaking a global problem?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wsxcde 10y ago
> most of the owners of these in various national institutes are shopping for customers to justify their funding What's the evidence for this claim? AFAIK the DoE INCITE awards -- which is how you get allocated time on the big supercomputers -- are quite competitive. Also the supercomputers don't cost billions. Aurora, for example only costs $200 million, and if it lasts as long as its predecessor Mira did, that is $200 million spread over 6 years, which is a pretty small number.
- toomanybeersies 10y ago
  Your idea of a small number and my idea of a small number are evidently very different.
  - yvdriess 10y ago
    If you look at supercomputing as a national strategic asset, that is a small number. The K-computer was around the price of a battleship: 1b USD
ChuckMcM 10y ago
> My conclusion was most of these computers aren't needed I don't disagree, but I wonder what is behind the investment in China. They are putting a significant chunk of resources on this and I'd like to understand why.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  Well, there's the PR value, both inside and outside the country. Maybe they're trying to convince investors that China's a good place to go if you want to fabricate computer chips.
fspeech 10y ago
Here are the applications given in the paper published by the designers and collaborators of the new supercomputer http://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SCIS/59/7/10.1007/s11432-016-5588-7?slug=abstract http://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SCIS/59/7/1... 5 Preliminary progress of scientific computing applications on the TaihuLight 5.1 Refactoring the community atmospheric model (CAM) on the Sunway TaihuLight 5.2 A fully-implicit nonhydrostatic dynamic solver for cloud-resolving atmospheric simulation on eight million cores 5.3 A highly effective global surface wave numerical simulation with ultra-high resolution 5.4 Peta-scale atomistic simulation of silicon nanowires 5.5 Large-scale phase-field simulation for coarsening dynamics based on Cahn-Hilliard equation with degenerated mobility 5.6 Application: summary and comparison
neutronicus 10y ago
I dunno, I run shit on a DoE supercomputer for my research and it sits in the queue for days.

by dkural 10y ago

batbomb 10y ago

Yep. I'm part of a significant project which is being shoehorned into a Cray because the government has already spent the money for it. If it's not an MPI job, it's going to be painful.

gbrown_ 10y ago
> If it's not an MPI job, it's going to be painful. What are you using for communication between nodes? To make the tone clear I'm genuinely interested as I'm not sure what running on a Cray prevents you from doing?
- batbomb 10y ago
  That's the problem: We don't need to communicate between the nodes; We don't need MPI. We need distributed databases and we might need Spark. We need machine learning. We need servers. We would like availability and reliability. We get full batch nodes that are relatively anemic in memory for our workload (4GB/core) for a maximum of 24 hours at a time.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - gbrown_ 10y ago
    Aha thanks! Yes I agree with you points here, not an ideal workload for a Cray system.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    Basically it's hard to use a Cray node as a stand-alone server. Yes it runs linux, but it has no storage, no external network. There is the so-called cluster compatibility mode but bottom line everything is a scheduled batch job in a very walled garden.
    - crznp 10y ago
      Cray invests a lot in their interconnect; if you aren't using it, there is little reason to be on a Cray. Which just emphasizes the point that most applications would be better served by cheaper, more resilient hardware.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - ams6110 10y ago
        All the stranger that they sold their interconnect technology, arguably their "secret sauce" to Intel. Without the interconnect, they are just a bunch of (very high quality) diskless x86 systems. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1261622 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1261622
  - nickbauman 10y ago
    > We don't need to communicate between the nodes Huh. At the core of almost every problem I've ever encountered in my 20+ year career programming that I would consider "interesting" is the need to allocate work across many compute nodes that have some amount of shared state. You could just as well take A* as a baseline for these types of problems. Your typical cloud computing infra/design is not a good match for these.

StreamBright 10y ago

Is this based on how US spends money or generally speaking a global problem?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wsxcde 10y ago

> most of the owners of these in various national institutes are shopping for customers to justify their funding What's the evidence for this claim? AFAIK the DoE INCITE awards -- which is how you get allocated time on the big supercomputers -- are quite competitive. Also the supercomputers don't cost billions. Aurora, for example only costs $200 million, and if it lasts as long as its predecessor Mira did, that is $200 million spread over 6 years, which is a pretty small number.

toomanybeersies 10y ago
Your idea of a small number and my idea of a small number are evidently very different.
- yvdriess 10y ago
  If you look at supercomputing as a national strategic asset, that is a small number. The K-computer was around the price of a battleship: 1b USD

ChuckMcM 10y ago

> My conclusion was most of these computers aren't needed I don't disagree, but I wonder what is behind the investment in China. They are putting a significant chunk of resources on this and I'd like to understand why.

blakeyrat 10y ago
Well, there's the PR value, both inside and outside the country. Maybe they're trying to convince investors that China's a good place to go if you want to fabricate computer chips.

fspeech 10y ago

Here are the applications given in the paper published by the designers and collaborators of the new supercomputer http://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SCIS/59/7/10.1007/s11432-016-5588-7?slug=abstract http://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SCIS/59/7/1... 5 Preliminary progress of scientific computing applications on the TaihuLight 5.1 Refactoring the community atmospheric model (CAM) on the Sunway TaihuLight 5.2 A fully-implicit nonhydrostatic dynamic solver for cloud-resolving atmospheric simulation on eight million cores 5.3 A highly effective global surface wave numerical simulation with ultra-high resolution 5.4 Peta-scale atomistic simulation of silicon nanowires 5.5 Large-scale phase-field simulation for coarsening dynamics based on Cahn-Hilliard equation with degenerated mobility 5.6 Application: summary and comparison

neutronicus 10y ago

I dunno, I run shit on a DoE supercomputer for my research and it sits in the queue for days.