3 ms·
Why do they need expensive Power 9s when the bulk of the processing is done by GPUs?
by kristianp 8y ago
Why do they need expensive Power 9s when the bulk of the processing is done by GPUs?
- bryanlarsen 8y agoBecause Power 9's have on-chip NVLink ports.
- JohannFlobuster 8y agoThis. CPUs are hungry.
- crb002 8y agoBecause all the Blue Gene/L/P/Q code is POWER.
- quadruplebond 8y agoSort of, but Blue Gene tech was always an Argonne thing, Oak Ridge has been the one doing GPUs for awhile now. Unless something weird happens Argonne and Oak Ridge will always be running different types of computer since we don’t want to be locked into one specific vendor or hardware configuration.
- eslaught 8y agoAren't all the new DOE machines GPU at this point? I understand A21 and NERSC9 both are, though the vendor isn't announced yet as far as I'm aware.
- quadruplebond 8y agoPartly because we don’t want to be locked into using Intel for both of DOE’s open science machines. In the lead up to the exascale or near exascale machines (2012-now) I don’t remember hearing much about AMD, so presumably Intel and IBM were the only vendors supplying general purpose CPUs.