19 ms·

Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

315 points by l31g 6y ago

mxcrossb 6y ago
It’s sort of funny to watch the ISC event and see news of a machine with an exaop of AI performance, while the zoom presentation still can’t properly crop out the background.
ViralBShah 6y ago
Given that today's HPC architectures are mostly power constrained, and a majority of the FLOPS often come from GPUs (for their flop/watt ratios), this direction is not surprising. ARM has been making major strides in the high performance area. The new AWS Graviton processors are pretty nice from what I have heard. And then there's the ARM in Mac. Yup and Julia will run on all of these! While I say all of this, I should also point out that the top500 benchmark pretty much is not representative of most real-life workloads, and is largely based on your ability to solve the largest dense linear solve you possibly can - something almost no real application does. (The website is down, so I haven't been able to look at the specs of the actual machine).
- fhqghds 6y ago
  Get ready for a surprise then: all those FLOPS are coming from the ARM cores.... This beast has no GPUs: https://postk-web.r-ccs.riken.jp/spec.html https://postk-web.r-ccs.riken.jp/spec.html
  - ViralBShah 6y ago
    That's pretty cool! That probably means that applications will have an easier time. Looks like it has 512-bit SIMD. I wonder what BLAS they are using, and if the contributions are open sourced.
    - gnufx 6y ago
      (SVE isn't 512-bit SIMD like AVX512.) I don't know what BLAS they're using, though I know they've long worked on their own, but BLIS has gained SVE support recently, for what it's worth.
      - floatboth 6y ago
        SVE is whatever width the chip designer wants, Fujitsu's implementation is 512-bit according to AnandTech
        gnufx 6y ago
        I know, but it's different apart from coming in different hardware widths, as ARM techies will gush.
        jabl 6y ago
        Yes, SVE, like the RISC-V vector extension, is a "real" vector ISA, with things like vector length register (no need for a scalar loop epilog), scatter/gather memory ops for sparse matrix work, mask registers for if-conversion, looser alignment requirements (no/less need for loop prologues). That being said, apart from becoming wider, AVX-NNN has also gotten more "real" vector features with every generation. The difference might not be as huge anymore.
  - leeter 6y ago
    So looking at anandtech's breakdown the CPUs are closer to a knights landing 'CPU/GPU' than a traditional CPU (currently). They also have a ton of HBM2 right next to the dies so this should be insanely fast as they can feed those cores very very quickly regardless of how fast each core is by clock and pipeline. That should massively reduce stalls.
    - stephencanon 6y ago
      The "traditional CPU" portion of the core is a bit more capable than KNL, but yeah, that's roughly accurate.
      - leeter 6y ago
        Oh agreed, but honestly what makes this so interesting is how tuned it is. I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen Intel or AMD ship an HPC CPU with on package HBM2 yet.
    - gnufx 6y ago
      As an early user of KNL, I don't get the "GPU" bit. KNL runs normal x86_64 code and doesn't look that much different to the AMD Interlagos systems I once used apart from the memory architecture.
      - leeter 6y ago
        It comes from the fact that KNL came from Larrabee which was actually developed as a GPU initially (and even ran games... sort of) but was never actually released. The next revision of that was the Xeon Phi chips you used. So the connection is "Lots of small cores with lots of high bandwidth ram" although these cores are definitely superscalar where Larrabee and derivatives were not really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)
        gnufx 6y ago
  - Merrill 6y ago
    It looks like this is not an ARM core, but a Fujitsu implementation of the Arm v8-A instruction set and Fujitsu-developed Scaleable Vector Extension. Most likely the latter is doing all the heavy lifting. https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-releases/2018/0822-02.html https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-re... >A64FX is the world's first CPU to adopt the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), an extension of Armv8-A instruction set architecture for supercomputers. Building on over 60 years' worth of Fujitsu-developed microarchitecture, this chip offers peak performance of over 2.7 TFLOPS, demonstrating superior HPC and AI performance.
    - d_tr 6y ago
      The text you linked to actually says that the SVE was developed cooperatively by Fujitsu and ARM, without, however, going into details about who did what.
      - numpad0 6y ago
        There are words floating that A64fx is basically a SPARC with ARM ISA without much ARM IP in it, no idea how accurate but intriguing
  - d_tr 6y ago
    I am really happy to have come across this post, mainly due to this fact.
- stephencanon 6y ago
  Worth noting that Fugaku has no GPU/accelerator; all the compute is located in-core (cpu). The core itself has some GPU-like qualities, of course, since it's more optimized for semi-uniform compute throughput than a "normal" CPU is.
- wenc 6y ago
  > based on your ability to solve the largest dense linear solve you possibly can - something almost no real application does. Sounds right. I was going to say what about large-scale optimization problems? But I realized that most typically only require sparse linear solves. Gradient descent does require the solution of dense Ax=b systems. But the most visible/popular application of large-scale gradient descent today, neural networks, typically use SGD which require no dense linear solves at all.
- gpderetta 6y ago
  Fujitsu has been building its own HPC CPUs, for a long time, whether they use the ARM architecture or SPARC doesn't probably matter much for them. They know how to make them fast.
  - bashinator 6y ago
    Yup, one of my first jobs out of college was at HAL.
- tasogare 6y ago
  > And then there's the ARM in Mac. Are you posting from the future or referring to the T2 chips?
  - kohtatsu 6y ago
    It was officially announced at the end of the WWDC event today.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  I'll count myself as someone surprised, given that GPUs are often better tuned to HPC code, that Fujitsu was able to do so well with an Intel Phi approach of just using larger vector units on general purpose CPUs. I wouldn't have thought you could make an out of order core efficiently support scatter/gather the way this thing seems to, though I guess it's possible that the vector unit is in order. Well, the proof is in the pudding and hats off to Fujitsu and ARM.
- calaphos 6y ago
  > While I say all of this, I should also point out that the top500 benchmark pretty much is not representative of most real-life workloads, and is largely based on your ability to solve the largest dense linear solve you possibly can - something almost no real application does. They also publish the HPCG benchmark with sparse matrixes. And unsurprisingly an order of magnitude lower flops across the board. The Fujitsu chip scales a whole lot better than the usual Nvidia GPUs though.
UI_at_80x24 6y ago
I can't help but think that the top minds from Cyrix aren't feeling both smug at the vindication and dismayed that they were just a little too ahead of the curve. The writing was on the wall that RISC would win, but the x86 juggernaut appeared unbeatable.
- qayxc 6y ago
  > The writing was on the wall that RISC would win [...] What do you mean by "win" exactly? RISC is just an architectural choice and means nothing on its own. For reference, Google's TPUs, which - according to Google - deliver 30-80x better performance per Watt than contemporary CPUs, use a CISC design instead [1]. This whole "RISC vs CISC"-nonsense is quite inane, given that it's a design choice that's highly application-specific. It's even debatable, whether the A64FX can even be considered a "pure" RISC design, considering the inclusion of SVE-512 and its 4 unspecified "assistant cores" [2] ... [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-at-googles-first-tensor-processing-unit-tpu https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-... [2] https://www.fujitsu.com/jp/Images/20180821hotchips30.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/jp/Images/20180821hotchips30.pdf
  - russler23 6y ago
    RISC is a philosophy, not so much a set of rules. If you let the creators of RISC define their approach, the division between RISC and CISC becomes more clear. Most summaries of RISC oversimplify it. Maybe that’s ironic, haha.
- axaxs 6y ago
  I remember Cyrix as just releasing Intel compatible/clone chips, am I misremembering something?
ksec 6y ago
Well the link is dead. But I am guessing it is from Fujitsu A64FX, a 512 bit SIMD extension for ARM. Edit: Turns out I was right. May be this link is better. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15869/new-1-supercomputer-fujitsus-fugaku-and-a64fx-take-arm-to-the-top-with-415-petaflops https://www.anandtech.com/show/15869/new-1-supercomputer-fuj...
- floatboth 6y ago
  To be clear, the extension -- Scalable Vector Extensions -- is for any width between 128 bits and 2048 bits. (It's in the name!) The implementation in Fujitsu A64FX seems to be 512 bit specifically.
sadfev 6y ago
Can any of the HPC experts shed some light on how these ARM chips are better than their predecessors. I toured a small cluster in LANL, where the ARM chips ran the hottest and their cooling was the loudest.
- blopeur 6y ago
  A64fx have on board HMB -> that means no dram. If you look at the fugaku mother board their is no Dimm slots. All the memory is on the same package as the CPU. This delivers a huge boost in bandwith. HMB stand for high memory bandwidth. It offers up to 900 GB/s. Now if you add the tofu interconnect on top you have a systems finely tuned for maximising data movement. Remember : compute is cheap, communication is expensive. You can have load of gpu and processors but if you can't feed them data fast enough they are useless.
  - ViralBShah 6y ago
    That is a pretty fun architecture. I hope that opens the door to higher performance for more workloads than top500. At least with the top500 benchmark, the bandwidth is not a problem, so long as you can do a large enough problem. Since it is a linear solve that spends all its time doing matmul (n^3 operations on n^2 data), so long as the problem is big enough, you can saturate the cores.
  - lukevp 6y ago
    That's fascinating. I know that AMD has been touting HBM as a faster memory subsystem for their GPUs, is that the same as HMB where it's stacked? Or are they just calling it something similar?
    - rrss 6y ago
      It's the same thing. High end GPUs have been using HBM2 for a few years, A64fx uses HBM2 for CPU memory.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      "HMB" is a typo, it is the same HBM. And yeah.. honestly I'm surprised AMD didn't do the HBM-CPU thing first. An HBM2-powered EPYC would've been an amazing product.
xhkkffbf 6y ago
Not to be dismissive, but can't anyone "build" the biggest supercomputer by reserving enough instances at AWS or GCP? I'm sure that AWS or GCP would like to encourage this competition, but it seems a bit, well, boring.
- fhqghds 6y ago
  yyyeah... no. A major part of what makes these machines special is their interconnect. Fujitsu is running a 6D torus interconnect with latencies well in the sub-usecond range. The special sauce is ability of cores to interact with each other with extreme bandwidth at extremely low latencies.
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    Thank you for this helpful info. For comparison's sake, say that you wanted to make babby's first super computer in your house with 2 laptops. That is to say, each laptop is a single core x86 system with its own motherboard and ram and ssd, and they are connected to each other in some way (ethernet? usb?) What software would one use to distribute some workload between these two nodes, what would the latency and bandwidth be bottlenecked by (the network connection?) and what other key statistics would be important in measuring exactly how this cheap $400 (used) set up compares to price/watt/flop performance for top 500 computers?
    - floren 6y ago
      The thing to keep in mind about supercomputers is that they are designed for particular applications. Nuclear weapons simulation, biological analysis (can we run simulations and get a vaccine?), cryptanalysis. These applications are usually written in MPI, which is what coordinates communication between nodes. If you want to play with it at home, connect those laptops to an ethernet network and install MPI on them both--you should be able to find tutorials with a little web searching. Then you could probably run Linpack if you felt like it, but if you wanted to learn a little more about how HPC applications actually work, you could write your own MPI application. I wrote an MPI raytracer in college; it's a relatively quick project and, again, you can probably find a tutorial for it online. Edit: Your cluster is going to suck terribly in comparison to "real" supercomputers, but scientists frequently do build their own small-scale clusters for application development. The actual big machines like Sequoia are all batch-processing and must be scheduled in advance, so it's a lot easier (and cheaper, supercomputer time costs money) to test your application locally in real-time.
mtgx 6y ago
Also a king in efficiency: https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/11/22/arm-supercomputer-captures-the-energy-efficiency-crown/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/11/22/arm-supercomputer-ca...
- rrss 6y ago
  The full scale supercomputer is not quite as efficient as the prototype. > The number nine system on the Green500 is the top-performing Fugaku supercomputer, which delivered 14.67 gigaflops per watt. It is just behind Summit in power efficiency, which achieved 14.72 gigaflops/watt.
davidhyde 6y ago
The site of the organisation responsible for assessing the fastest computers in the world succumbs to the hacker news hug of death.
- jbay808 6y ago
  To be fair, I wouldn't host my website on my world-class supercomputer either, if I had one...
  - 3pt14159 6y ago
    To be even fairer, I've served a shit ton of traffic on a small DigitalOcean droplet and never had issues because my stack is reasonable.
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      What’s your stack, and how much traffic?
      - gtufano 6y ago
        I survived without errors from being to HN front page with Nginx and a static site (made with Hugo, iirc) on a Linode 1GB (when the plan was still existing). No CDN whatsoever.
        phkahler 6y ago
        That sounds reasonable to me. In the old days people used Apache because it was available and worked. But because the performance was shit they adopted other complex means of dealing with heavy loads. Nginx has dramatically improved the web server performance problem but a lot of old practices are still in place.
    - devwastaken 6y ago
      To be fairest you can serve pages on a potato and as long as it's cached by cloudflare no one will know.
pininja 6y ago
The link is working for me, here are the details on the winner. “The new top system, Fugaku, turned in a High Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, besting the now second-place Summit system by a factor of 2.8x. Fugaku, is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, becoming the first number one system on the list to be powered by ARM processors. In single or further reduced precision, which are often used in machine learning and AI applications, Fugaku’s peak performance is over 1,000 petaflops (1 exaflops). The new system is installed at RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.
- timClicks 6y ago
  Wow, so we've hit exascale. I heard claims that we would reach exascale by 2020 in 2012. I didn't believe them.
  - zekrioca 6y ago
    0.5 exascale
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  There seems to be a difference between peak and useful. Be careful of marketing and hype. (I am not an HPC guy, just IMO).
  - theaustinseven 6y ago
    It goes further than that. HPL is already a bad benchmark since it just prioritizes the narrow requirements of HPL(double precision multiplication and bandwidth). HPCC(https://icl.utk.edu/hpcc/ https://icl.utk.edu/hpcc/) is generally regarded to be a better benchmark of the real value of a particular cluster for scientific use.
KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
We're living in an age in which AWS dwarfs all the machines on the TOP500 taken together. The TOP500 is a vestige of the cold war that needs to be retired. Similarly to how the US and the USSR used to compare their numbers of nuclear warheads, it is comparing a reserve of capacity that is probably going to be retired having brought marginal benefits at best, all in order to goad taxpayers into a futile competition.
- rwmj 6y ago
  What a complete load of nonsense. Do let us know what your AWS bills are like when you run your 100s of petaflops HPC job there. And what is the interconnect like? A few gigabit switches aren't the same as the interconnects on these supercomputers.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    AWS isn't just a couple gigabit switches, they do offer some HPC-oriented things: https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/efa/ https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/efa/
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Google Cloud has a much superior interconnect, easily doing twice the bandwidth of AWS with lower latency. Ethernet may not be approaching Infiniband in raw speed and latency, but I think it's doing pretty decently with 10 Gbps going to every node. Ethernet networks are definitely much more competitive today than 10 years ago, when Infiniband already had cheap 20 Gbps network cards but 10 Gbps Ethernet card were expensive and the network switches were a rarity.
- 6AA4FD 6y ago
  I don't think more than half a percent of taxpayers know about top500, and I don't think many who know even care how their country ranks.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Side story: HPC ranking is relatively common topic in Japan because previous K computer was targeted to cut budget by government and well reported by news.
IncRnd 6y ago
http://archive.is/PNY80 http://archive.is/PNY80
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
I suggest building a supercomputer out of Ivy Bridge Celerons. They are dirty cheap, like $2 in bulk, yet quite performant.
- m_mueller 6y ago
  For this kind of system the price of the processors isn't really a big focus.
- zokier 6y ago
  Can you buy 10+ million units of those?
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    Finally someone who got the joke.
deleted 6y ago
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gok 6y ago
It's kind of interesting that in terms of perf/watt, it's actually slightly less efficient than Summit, which is over 2 years old. Also interesting that they went with a homogenous design (all Arm cores) instead of a heterogenous CPU+GPU setup.
dman 6y ago
Really wish Fujitsu sold a developer kit with an A64fx chip - its the only shipping ARM chip with SVE that I know of and I would love to get my hands on one to play with.
- vt240 6y ago
  There are some architecture manuals on github to peruse. https://github.com/fujitsu/A64FX https://github.com/fujitsu/A64FX
- loudmax 6y ago
  No kidding! I don't have any sense of how much these cost to manufacture. There ought to be a market for a A64fx based rackmount server system. If the price isn't outrageous, I'd love to see these sold as an SBC.
  - timthorn 6y ago
    Something like the Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX700?
    - krapht 6y ago
      Minimum 128 unit purchase for those outside Japan, though.
      - kohtatsu 6y ago
        A group buy would be cool.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- gnufx 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure there's an emulator, which is how you usually do early development.
  - 6y ago
praveen9920 6y ago
Pushing the boundaries is the best way to advance technology Car manufacturers need ridiculously expensive race cars to push the technology to get advancements in everyday car technology. Similarly, Top500 is one way to push the technology for not just computationally but also things like better power, heat and network management in processors and computers in general. With ever doubling server farms, Heat management of these systems will become the major contributor for environmental pollution than all vehicle exhaust. Rather than spending on renewable sources of energy for these farms, it makes sense to optimize energy consumed per processor. Hoping to see advancements in this area In my opinion, next arm/intel will be the company who does energy efficient processors
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dawg- 6y ago
  >Heat management of these systems will become the major contributor for environmental pollution Here's an idea, maybe we should just turn the moon into a giant data center?
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    In a vacuum the only way to dissipate heat is radiation and to a lesser extent conduction. In an atmosphere you also have convection. It's more efficient to cool something on Earth than on the Moon. We also have more power options on Earth. On the Moon you'd only really have solar power available and then only two weeks a month. On Earth you've got insolation for half a day every day and the option of other renewable sources. This is all besides the phenomenal cost of building data centers on the Moon vs Earth.
    - moonchild 6y ago
      > heat dissipation Eh, the moon is made of pretty cold rock. > two weeks a month > half a day every day Amortized, that's the same thing.
mortenjorck 6y ago
I cannot think of any plausible way in which Apple could have influenced the date of this announcement, but the timing, given what is expected to be announced later today, is uncanny.
- ksec 6y ago
  Imagine if Apple were to announce a Mac utilise the exact same chip. A powerful high TDP CPU will be great fit for Apple, while they continue to focus on low power and energy efficiency for their mainstream product.
  - nordsieck 6y ago
    > Imagine if Apple were to announce a Mac utilise the exact same chip. This seems unlikely unless Apple has decided to sell their chips for the first time ever. I suppose it could be interesting from Apple's PR perspective, but I have serious doubts that the supercomputer owner would agree to this. What happens to them when Apple discontinues the current chip in favor of the next one?
  - blattimwind 6y ago
    The A64fx isn't that high TDP, if the reported number of ~160 W for the entire thing (including HBM) is accurate.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- swyx 6y ago
  am out of the loop. what is the rumor?
  - nvahalik 6y ago
    That Apple will be moving at least part of their consumer machines to ARM-based chips.
- cbkeller 6y ago
fizixer 6y ago
As I have said countless times in the past: - Moore's law is dead at the level of the transistor - Architecture, HPC updates will keep coming for many years into the future - AGI has already escaped Moore's law (i.e., development of a fully functional AGI will not be constrained by lack of Moore's law progress). And that's what really matters. - Related note on AGI: it has escaped the data problem as well (as in we have the right kind of sensors: mainly cameras, microphones, and so on). That is, according to the categorization of AGI challenges in terms of hardware, data, algorithms, the only missing piece is the right set of algorithms.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Why do you say that AGI has escaped Moore's law? Especially, how can you say so when you don't know what the right set of algorithms are?
  - fizixer 6y ago
    Oh then you're not going to like what I'm going to say next: - Somewhere between 2015 and 2025, multiple individual groups will have cracked the AGI problem independently. (but 2015 is in the past, which means there are likely groups out there that have cracked the problem and keeping it a secret). - AGI-in-the-basement scenario is very doable and has been or will be done, many times over.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      And your evidence for this claim is... what?
      - fizixer 6y ago
        A combination of: - sources available freely online - my own thought process and piecing of things together
        AnimalMuppet 6y ago
ausbah 6y ago
is x86 likely to ever go away, or anytime soon? asking as a non-systems guy
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Not for a long time. ARM is just more competition which is good. The guys claiming that Intel is basically a has been and can't make anything new don't know what they're talking about. Intel has come back more than once. Competition is good, I'm glad it's heating up a bit more these days.
hangonhn 6y ago
Anyone know the reason for the dominance of Power processors in the top 10 other than it's from IBM and they get a lot of contracts for HPC?
- detaro 6y ago
  They're fast, have lots of memory and IO bandwidth and can do some cool other tricks (I can't remember the name right now, but they have thing for PCIe devices to participate in cache coherency, their in-system protocols scale better to more CPUs, ...)
  - gnufx 6y ago
    CAPI
    - detaro 6y ago
      exactly, thanks
- hydroreadsstuff 6y ago
  The main reason is the partnership with nvidia. You get nvlink to the CPU, which you don't get on Intel/AMD (I believe). Other than that, I don't think there is a real competitive reason. The support and future timeline from IBM is lacking. I'm honestly surprised they are still big friends.
Aaronstotle 6y ago
CoreTeks on youtube has a great video that explains the brilliance of this chip.
- d_tr 6y ago
  Good video indeed. Extra points for featuring Satoru Iwata!
- tandr 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfHG7bj-CEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfHG7bj-CEI That video is from end of 2018... which makes it even more amazing.
flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago
There's something amusing about a blog post announcing the fastest computer in the world being unable to serve up web requests in under 10 seconds. (When I wrote this comment, I was seeing 500 status code errors when trying to load the page)
- glouwbug 6y ago
  True, but we can blame the programmer as we usually do
ClarkMills 6y ago
Ah but does it run Linux? [probably but couldn't see in the link] Looks like another nail in Intel's coffin...
akamoonknight 6y ago
Is there information on how the Fugaku machines are connected together? The highest performing Power9 ones seem to use InfiniBand, but is that still true with the ARM devices? Edit: seems to be a Fujitsu designed interconnect [0]. Wonder how much of the overall performance is dependent on the difference in communication. https://www.fujitsu.com/global/documents/solutions/business-technology/tc/catalog/08514929.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/documents/solutions/business-...
- gnufx 6y ago
  I don't know whats the best reference, but here's one: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/the-tofu-interconnect-d-for-supercomputer-fugaku.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/the-tofu-interconnect-...
  - akamoonknight 6y ago
    Ah, much better than the white paper, thanks!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
cwaffles 6y ago
Backup link if you're getting http 503: http://archive.is/JSvCi http://archive.is/JSvCi
deleted 6y ago
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Animats 6y ago
The end of the US semiconductor industry is now in sight. The only US owned state of the art fabs in the US belong to Intel. Intel survives because they have a high margin on x86 CPUs. Today, TMSC announced 5nm, and the top supercomputer is ARM-based. Apple seems to be going ARM. Chromebooks are ARM. Microsoft now offers Windows on ARM, on the Surface Pro X. Mobile never used x86. x86 is on the way out. What's left for Intel? (Micron is still a major force in DRAM, amazingly.)
- floatboth 6y ago
  > The only US owned state of the art fabs in the US belong to Intel Is the "US owned" clarification to exclude Global Foundries' New York fab? :D > Chromebooks are ARM Maybe half of them. > What's left for Intel? Fabricating others' designs like TSMC? But also, Intel isn't going away any time soon, just not being a monopoly anymore.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Global Foundries New York fab (Fab 8), from Wikipedia: Technology: 28 nm and 14 nm. 7 nm planned. However, in August 2018, GlobalFoundries made the decision to suspend 7 nm development and planned production, citing the unaffordable costs to outfit Fab 8 for 7 nm production. GlobalFoundries held open the possibility of resuming 7 nm operations in the future if additional resources could be secured. So, not a state of the art fab. Couldn't afford to keep up.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      Yeah, not "state of the art" technically, but that's where the first generation Ryzens (14nm) were made, which still feels like yesterday to me, haha. "14nm" is still good enough, especially considering Intel's "10nm" vaporware..
      - fomine3 6y ago
        GF 14nm is still behind from Intel 14nm for actual size.
Symmetry 6y ago
For those interested in more details they did a presentation at Hot Chips. The slides are here: https://www.hotchips.org/hc30/2conf/2.13_Fujitsu_HC30.Fujitsu.Yoshida.rev1.2.pdf https://www.hotchips.org/hc30/2conf/2.13_Fujitsu_HC30.Fujits...
fomine3 6y ago
Green500 #1 is MN-3 by PFN that's also from Japan and they also use original chip!
- IanCutress 6y ago
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/15177/preferred-networks-a-500-w-custom-pcie-card-using-3000-mm2-silicon https://www.anandtech.com/show/15177/preferred-networks-a-50...
calaphos 6y ago
Even more impressive than the linpack result (2.8x faster than the runner up) is the HPCG result at 4.6x the result of summit in second place. That benchmark consists of more sparse matrixes which are a lot more realistic depiction of hpc workloads. Seems to scale a lot better with irregular access patterns than basically Nvidia GPUs on the other systems.
gnufx 6y ago
Perhaps it's worth pointing out some context. Given the remarkable predecessor, K Computer, this was only a matter of time. (I heard a great early talk on K, and I wish I knew the speaker for credit who was obviously working quite hard in English, but flawless, ending with basically we did it all ourselves largely de nuovo.) It seems that given the current circumstances, they haven't kept to schedule -- it was supposed to be operating next year. There's a lot non-mainstream in this, like K, but partly influenced by K experience. Unusually, it's all apparently specifically designed for the job, from the processor to the operating system (only partly GNU/Linux). Notably, despite the innovation, it should still run anything that can reasonably be built for aarch64 straight off and use the whole node, even if it doesn't run particularly fast; contrast GPU-based systems. (With something like simde, you may even be able to run typical x86-specific code.) However, the amount of memory/core is surprising -- even less than Blue Gene Q -- and I wonder how that works out for large-scale materials science work for which it's obviously prepared. Also note Fujitsu's consideration of reliability, though the oft-quoted theory of failure rates in exascale-ish machines was obviously wrong, otherwise as the Livermore CTO said, he'd be out of a job. The bad news for anyone potentially operating a similar system in a university, for instance, is that the typical nightmare proprietary software is apparently becoming available for it...
- guicho271828 6y ago
  FYI, https://github.com/fujitsu/A64FX https://github.com/fujitsu/A64FX
- m_mueller 6y ago
  Maybe you mean Matsuoka sensei? He's the director of RIKEN AICS since a couple of years and a known media figure in Japan.
  - jabl 6y ago
    Satoshi Matsuoka is an "international rock star" in HPC circles. But I don't think he was involved with the K computer; before RIKEN he was IIRC at Tokyo Tech doing their "Tsubame" GPU clusters.
d_tr 6y ago
For what it's worth, Cray is also offering supercomputers with A64FX chips.
29athrowaway 6y ago
Some more information about Fugaku, aka Post-K, here: - Slides on Fugaku: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/supercomputer-fugaku.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/supercomputer-fugaku.p... - SVE 512 instructions for armv8: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/armv8-a-scalable-vector-extension-for-post-k.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/armv8-a-scalable-vecto...
cinntaile 6y ago
This kind of feels like a publicity stunt for Arm. Arm is owned by the Japanese company SoftBank and now Japan captures the supercomputer crown. I don't want to take away from the achievement and it's certainly possible that this is just a coincidence, maybe someone with more knowledge on the subject can comment on this?
- lovemenot 6y ago
  Fujitsu announced they would be building a Kei2 based on ARM, soon after their Kei was #1 around 5 years ago. ARM was a British company until it was bought by SoftBank a couple of years ago.

315 points by l31g 6y ago

It’s sort of funny to watch the ISC event and see news of a machine with an exaop of AI performance, while the zoom presentation still can’t properly crop out the background.

ViralBShah 6y ago

Given that today's HPC architectures are mostly power constrained, and a majority of the FLOPS often come from GPUs (for their flop/watt ratios), this direction is not surprising. ARM has been making major strides in the high performance area. The new AWS Graviton processors are pretty nice from what I have heard. And then there's the ARM in Mac. Yup and Julia will run on all of these! While I say all of this, I should also point out that the top500 benchmark pretty much is not representative of most real-life workloads, and is largely based on your ability to solve the largest dense linear solve you possibly can - something almost no real application does. (The website is down, so I haven't been able to look at the specs of the actual machine).

fhqghds 6y ago
Get ready for a surprise then: all those FLOPS are coming from the ARM cores.... This beast has no GPUs: https://postk-web.r-ccs.riken.jp/spec.html https://postk-web.r-ccs.riken.jp/spec.html
- ViralBShah 6y ago
  That's pretty cool! That probably means that applications will have an easier time. Looks like it has 512-bit SIMD. I wonder what BLAS they are using, and if the contributions are open sourced.
  - gnufx 6y ago
    (SVE isn't 512-bit SIMD like AVX512.) I don't know what BLAS they're using, though I know they've long worked on their own, but BLIS has gained SVE support recently, for what it's worth.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      SVE is whatever width the chip designer wants, Fujitsu's implementation is 512-bit according to AnandTech
      - gnufx 6y ago
        I know, but it's different apart from coming in different hardware widths, as ARM techies will gush.
        jabl 6y ago
        Yes, SVE, like the RISC-V vector extension, is a "real" vector ISA, with things like vector length register (no need for a scalar loop epilog), scatter/gather memory ops for sparse matrix work, mask registers for if-conversion, looser alignment requirements (no/less need for loop prologues). That being said, apart from becoming wider, AVX-NNN has also gotten more "real" vector features with every generation. The difference might not be as huge anymore.
- leeter 6y ago
  So looking at anandtech's breakdown the CPUs are closer to a knights landing 'CPU/GPU' than a traditional CPU (currently). They also have a ton of HBM2 right next to the dies so this should be insanely fast as they can feed those cores very very quickly regardless of how fast each core is by clock and pipeline. That should massively reduce stalls.
  - stephencanon 6y ago
    The "traditional CPU" portion of the core is a bit more capable than KNL, but yeah, that's roughly accurate.
    - leeter 6y ago
      Oh agreed, but honestly what makes this so interesting is how tuned it is. I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen Intel or AMD ship an HPC CPU with on package HBM2 yet.
  - gnufx 6y ago
    As an early user of KNL, I don't get the "GPU" bit. KNL runs normal x86_64 code and doesn't look that much different to the AMD Interlagos systems I once used apart from the memory architecture.
    - leeter 6y ago
      It comes from the fact that KNL came from Larrabee which was actually developed as a GPU initially (and even ran games... sort of) but was never actually released. The next revision of that was the Xeon Phi chips you used. So the connection is "Lots of small cores with lots of high bandwidth ram" although these cores are definitely superscalar where Larrabee and derivatives were not really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)
      - gnufx 6y ago
- Merrill 6y ago
  It looks like this is not an ARM core, but a Fujitsu implementation of the Arm v8-A instruction set and Fujitsu-developed Scaleable Vector Extension. Most likely the latter is doing all the heavy lifting. https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-releases/2018/0822-02.html https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-re... >A64FX is the world's first CPU to adopt the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), an extension of Armv8-A instruction set architecture for supercomputers. Building on over 60 years' worth of Fujitsu-developed microarchitecture, this chip offers peak performance of over 2.7 TFLOPS, demonstrating superior HPC and AI performance.
  - d_tr 6y ago
    The text you linked to actually says that the SVE was developed cooperatively by Fujitsu and ARM, without, however, going into details about who did what.
    - numpad0 6y ago
      There are words floating that A64fx is basically a SPARC with ARM ISA without much ARM IP in it, no idea how accurate but intriguing
- d_tr 6y ago
  I am really happy to have come across this post, mainly due to this fact.
stephencanon 6y ago
Worth noting that Fugaku has no GPU/accelerator; all the compute is located in-core (cpu). The core itself has some GPU-like qualities, of course, since it's more optimized for semi-uniform compute throughput than a "normal" CPU is.
wenc 6y ago
> based on your ability to solve the largest dense linear solve you possibly can - something almost no real application does. Sounds right. I was going to say what about large-scale optimization problems? But I realized that most typically only require sparse linear solves. Gradient descent does require the solution of dense Ax=b systems. But the most visible/popular application of large-scale gradient descent today, neural networks, typically use SGD which require no dense linear solves at all.
gpderetta 6y ago
Fujitsu has been building its own HPC CPUs, for a long time, whether they use the ARM architecture or SPARC doesn't probably matter much for them. They know how to make them fast.
- bashinator 6y ago
  Yup, one of my first jobs out of college was at HAL.
tasogare 6y ago
> And then there's the ARM in Mac. Are you posting from the future or referring to the T2 chips?
- kohtatsu 6y ago
  It was officially announced at the end of the WWDC event today.
Symmetry 6y ago
I'll count myself as someone surprised, given that GPUs are often better tuned to HPC code, that Fujitsu was able to do so well with an Intel Phi approach of just using larger vector units on general purpose CPUs. I wouldn't have thought you could make an out of order core efficiently support scatter/gather the way this thing seems to, though I guess it's possible that the vector unit is in order. Well, the proof is in the pudding and hats off to Fujitsu and ARM.
calaphos 6y ago
> While I say all of this, I should also point out that the top500 benchmark pretty much is not representative of most real-life workloads, and is largely based on your ability to solve the largest dense linear solve you possibly can - something almost no real application does. They also publish the HPCG benchmark with sparse matrixes. And unsurprisingly an order of magnitude lower flops across the board. The Fujitsu chip scales a whole lot better than the usual Nvidia GPUs though.

UI_at_80x24 6y ago

I can't help but think that the top minds from Cyrix aren't feeling both smug at the vindication and dismayed that they were just a little too ahead of the curve. The writing was on the wall that RISC would win, but the x86 juggernaut appeared unbeatable.

qayxc 6y ago
> The writing was on the wall that RISC would win [...] What do you mean by "win" exactly? RISC is just an architectural choice and means nothing on its own. For reference, Google's TPUs, which - according to Google - deliver 30-80x better performance per Watt than contemporary CPUs, use a CISC design instead [1]. This whole "RISC vs CISC"-nonsense is quite inane, given that it's a design choice that's highly application-specific. It's even debatable, whether the A64FX can even be considered a "pure" RISC design, considering the inclusion of SVE-512 and its 4 unspecified "assistant cores" [2] ... [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-at-googles-first-tensor-processing-unit-tpu https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-... [2] https://www.fujitsu.com/jp/Images/20180821hotchips30.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/jp/Images/20180821hotchips30.pdf
- russler23 6y ago
  RISC is a philosophy, not so much a set of rules. If you let the creators of RISC define their approach, the division between RISC and CISC becomes more clear. Most summaries of RISC oversimplify it. Maybe that’s ironic, haha.
axaxs 6y ago
I remember Cyrix as just releasing Intel compatible/clone chips, am I misremembering something?

ksec 6y ago

Well the link is dead. But I am guessing it is from Fujitsu A64FX, a 512 bit SIMD extension for ARM. Edit: Turns out I was right. May be this link is better. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15869/new-1-supercomputer-fujitsus-fugaku-and-a64fx-take-arm-to-the-top-with-415-petaflops https://www.anandtech.com/show/15869/new-1-supercomputer-fuj...

floatboth 6y ago
To be clear, the extension -- Scalable Vector Extensions -- is for any width between 128 bits and 2048 bits. (It's in the name!) The implementation in Fujitsu A64FX seems to be 512 bit specifically.

sadfev 6y ago

Can any of the HPC experts shed some light on how these ARM chips are better than their predecessors. I toured a small cluster in LANL, where the ARM chips ran the hottest and their cooling was the loudest.

blopeur 6y ago
A64fx have on board HMB -> that means no dram. If you look at the fugaku mother board their is no Dimm slots. All the memory is on the same package as the CPU. This delivers a huge boost in bandwith. HMB stand for high memory bandwidth. It offers up to 900 GB/s. Now if you add the tofu interconnect on top you have a systems finely tuned for maximising data movement. Remember : compute is cheap, communication is expensive. You can have load of gpu and processors but if you can't feed them data fast enough they are useless.
- ViralBShah 6y ago
  That is a pretty fun architecture. I hope that opens the door to higher performance for more workloads than top500. At least with the top500 benchmark, the bandwidth is not a problem, so long as you can do a large enough problem. Since it is a linear solve that spends all its time doing matmul (n^3 operations on n^2 data), so long as the problem is big enough, you can saturate the cores.
- lukevp 6y ago
  That's fascinating. I know that AMD has been touting HBM as a faster memory subsystem for their GPUs, is that the same as HMB where it's stacked? Or are they just calling it something similar?
  - rrss 6y ago
    It's the same thing. High end GPUs have been using HBM2 for a few years, A64fx uses HBM2 for CPU memory.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    "HMB" is a typo, it is the same HBM. And yeah.. honestly I'm surprised AMD didn't do the HBM-CPU thing first. An HBM2-powered EPYC would've been an amazing product.

xhkkffbf 6y ago

Not to be dismissive, but can't anyone "build" the biggest supercomputer by reserving enough instances at AWS or GCP? I'm sure that AWS or GCP would like to encourage this competition, but it seems a bit, well, boring.

fhqghds 6y ago
yyyeah... no. A major part of what makes these machines special is their interconnect. Fujitsu is running a 6D torus interconnect with latencies well in the sub-usecond range. The special sauce is ability of cores to interact with each other with extreme bandwidth at extremely low latencies.
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  Thank you for this helpful info. For comparison's sake, say that you wanted to make babby's first super computer in your house with 2 laptops. That is to say, each laptop is a single core x86 system with its own motherboard and ram and ssd, and they are connected to each other in some way (ethernet? usb?) What software would one use to distribute some workload between these two nodes, what would the latency and bandwidth be bottlenecked by (the network connection?) and what other key statistics would be important in measuring exactly how this cheap $400 (used) set up compares to price/watt/flop performance for top 500 computers?
  - floren 6y ago
    The thing to keep in mind about supercomputers is that they are designed for particular applications. Nuclear weapons simulation, biological analysis (can we run simulations and get a vaccine?), cryptanalysis. These applications are usually written in MPI, which is what coordinates communication between nodes. If you want to play with it at home, connect those laptops to an ethernet network and install MPI on them both--you should be able to find tutorials with a little web searching. Then you could probably run Linpack if you felt like it, but if you wanted to learn a little more about how HPC applications actually work, you could write your own MPI application. I wrote an MPI raytracer in college; it's a relatively quick project and, again, you can probably find a tutorial for it online. Edit: Your cluster is going to suck terribly in comparison to "real" supercomputers, but scientists frequently do build their own small-scale clusters for application development. The actual big machines like Sequoia are all batch-processing and must be scheduled in advance, so it's a lot easier (and cheaper, supercomputer time costs money) to test your application locally in real-time.

mtgx 6y ago

Also a king in efficiency: https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/11/22/arm-supercomputer-captures-the-energy-efficiency-crown/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/11/22/arm-supercomputer-ca...

rrss 6y ago
The full scale supercomputer is not quite as efficient as the prototype. > The number nine system on the Green500 is the top-performing Fugaku supercomputer, which delivered 14.67 gigaflops per watt. It is just behind Summit in power efficiency, which achieved 14.72 gigaflops/watt.

davidhyde 6y ago

The site of the organisation responsible for assessing the fastest computers in the world succumbs to the hacker news hug of death.

jbay808 6y ago
To be fair, I wouldn't host my website on my world-class supercomputer either, if I had one...
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  To be even fairer, I've served a shit ton of traffic on a small DigitalOcean droplet and never had issues because my stack is reasonable.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    What’s your stack, and how much traffic?
    - gtufano 6y ago
      I survived without errors from being to HN front page with Nginx and a static site (made with Hugo, iirc) on a Linode 1GB (when the plan was still existing). No CDN whatsoever.
      - phkahler 6y ago
        That sounds reasonable to me. In the old days people used Apache because it was available and worked. But because the performance was shit they adopted other complex means of dealing with heavy loads. Nginx has dramatically improved the web server performance problem but a lot of old practices are still in place.
  - devwastaken 6y ago
    To be fairest you can serve pages on a potato and as long as it's cached by cloudflare no one will know.

pininja 6y ago

The link is working for me, here are the details on the winner. “The new top system, Fugaku, turned in a High Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, besting the now second-place Summit system by a factor of 2.8x. Fugaku, is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, becoming the first number one system on the list to be powered by ARM processors. In single or further reduced precision, which are often used in machine learning and AI applications, Fugaku’s peak performance is over 1,000 petaflops (1 exaflops). The new system is installed at RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.

timClicks 6y ago
Wow, so we've hit exascale. I heard claims that we would reach exascale by 2020 in 2012. I didn't believe them.
- zekrioca 6y ago
  0.5 exascale
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
There seems to be a difference between peak and useful. Be careful of marketing and hype. (I am not an HPC guy, just IMO).
- theaustinseven 6y ago
  It goes further than that. HPL is already a bad benchmark since it just prioritizes the narrow requirements of HPL(double precision multiplication and bandwidth). HPCC(https://icl.utk.edu/hpcc/ https://icl.utk.edu/hpcc/) is generally regarded to be a better benchmark of the real value of a particular cluster for scientific use.

KKKKkkkk1 6y ago

We're living in an age in which AWS dwarfs all the machines on the TOP500 taken together. The TOP500 is a vestige of the cold war that needs to be retired. Similarly to how the US and the USSR used to compare their numbers of nuclear warheads, it is comparing a reserve of capacity that is probably going to be retired having brought marginal benefits at best, all in order to goad taxpayers into a futile competition.

rwmj 6y ago
What a complete load of nonsense. Do let us know what your AWS bills are like when you run your 100s of petaflops HPC job there. And what is the interconnect like? A few gigabit switches aren't the same as the interconnects on these supercomputers.
- floatboth 6y ago
  AWS isn't just a couple gigabit switches, they do offer some HPC-oriented things: https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/efa/ https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/efa/
- user5994461 6y ago
  Google Cloud has a much superior interconnect, easily doing twice the bandwidth of AWS with lower latency. Ethernet may not be approaching Infiniband in raw speed and latency, but I think it's doing pretty decently with 10 Gbps going to every node. Ethernet networks are definitely much more competitive today than 10 years ago, when Infiniband already had cheap 20 Gbps network cards but 10 Gbps Ethernet card were expensive and the network switches were a rarity.
6AA4FD 6y ago
I don't think more than half a percent of taxpayers know about top500, and I don't think many who know even care how their country ranks.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Side story: HPC ranking is relatively common topic in Japan because previous K computer was targeted to cut budget by government and well reported by news.

IncRnd 6y ago

http://archive.is/PNY80 http://archive.is/PNY80

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago

I suggest building a supercomputer out of Ivy Bridge Celerons. They are dirty cheap, like $2 in bulk, yet quite performant.

m_mueller 6y ago
For this kind of system the price of the processors isn't really a big focus.
zokier 6y ago
Can you buy 10+ million units of those?
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  Finally someone who got the joke.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gok 6y ago

It's kind of interesting that in terms of perf/watt, it's actually slightly less efficient than Summit, which is over 2 years old. Also interesting that they went with a homogenous design (all Arm cores) instead of a heterogenous CPU+GPU setup.

dman 6y ago

Really wish Fujitsu sold a developer kit with an A64fx chip - its the only shipping ARM chip with SVE that I know of and I would love to get my hands on one to play with.

vt240 6y ago
There are some architecture manuals on github to peruse. https://github.com/fujitsu/A64FX https://github.com/fujitsu/A64FX
loudmax 6y ago
No kidding! I don't have any sense of how much these cost to manufacture. There ought to be a market for a A64fx based rackmount server system. If the price isn't outrageous, I'd love to see these sold as an SBC.
- timthorn 6y ago
  Something like the Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX700?
  - krapht 6y ago
    Minimum 128 unit purchase for those outside Japan, though.
    - kohtatsu 6y ago
      A group buy would be cool.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
gnufx 6y ago
I'm pretty sure there's an emulator, which is how you usually do early development.
- 6y ago

praveen9920 6y ago

Pushing the boundaries is the best way to advance technology Car manufacturers need ridiculously expensive race cars to push the technology to get advancements in everyday car technology. Similarly, Top500 is one way to push the technology for not just computationally but also things like better power, heat and network management in processors and computers in general. With ever doubling server farms, Heat management of these systems will become the major contributor for environmental pollution than all vehicle exhaust. Rather than spending on renewable sources of energy for these farms, it makes sense to optimize energy consumed per processor. Hoping to see advancements in this area In my opinion, next arm/intel will be the company who does energy efficient processors

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dawg- 6y ago
>Heat management of these systems will become the major contributor for environmental pollution Here's an idea, maybe we should just turn the moon into a giant data center?
- giantrobot 6y ago
  In a vacuum the only way to dissipate heat is radiation and to a lesser extent conduction. In an atmosphere you also have convection. It's more efficient to cool something on Earth than on the Moon. We also have more power options on Earth. On the Moon you'd only really have solar power available and then only two weeks a month. On Earth you've got insolation for half a day every day and the option of other renewable sources. This is all besides the phenomenal cost of building data centers on the Moon vs Earth.
  - moonchild 6y ago
    > heat dissipation Eh, the moon is made of pretty cold rock. > two weeks a month > half a day every day Amortized, that's the same thing.

mortenjorck 6y ago

I cannot think of any plausible way in which Apple could have influenced the date of this announcement, but the timing, given what is expected to be announced later today, is uncanny.

ksec 6y ago
Imagine if Apple were to announce a Mac utilise the exact same chip. A powerful high TDP CPU will be great fit for Apple, while they continue to focus on low power and energy efficiency for their mainstream product.
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > Imagine if Apple were to announce a Mac utilise the exact same chip. This seems unlikely unless Apple has decided to sell their chips for the first time ever. I suppose it could be interesting from Apple's PR perspective, but I have serious doubts that the supercomputer owner would agree to this. What happens to them when Apple discontinues the current chip in favor of the next one?
- blattimwind 6y ago
  The A64fx isn't that high TDP, if the reported number of ~160 W for the entire thing (including HBM) is accurate.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
swyx 6y ago
am out of the loop. what is the rumor?
- nvahalik 6y ago
  That Apple will be moving at least part of their consumer machines to ARM-based chips.
cbkeller 6y ago

fizixer 6y ago

As I have said countless times in the past: - Moore's law is dead at the level of the transistor - Architecture, HPC updates will keep coming for many years into the future - AGI has already escaped Moore's law (i.e., development of a fully functional AGI will not be constrained by lack of Moore's law progress). And that's what really matters. - Related note on AGI: it has escaped the data problem as well (as in we have the right kind of sensors: mainly cameras, microphones, and so on). That is, according to the categorization of AGI challenges in terms of hardware, data, algorithms, the only missing piece is the right set of algorithms.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Why do you say that AGI has escaped Moore's law? Especially, how can you say so when you don't know what the right set of algorithms are?
- fizixer 6y ago
  Oh then you're not going to like what I'm going to say next: - Somewhere between 2015 and 2025, multiple individual groups will have cracked the AGI problem independently. (but 2015 is in the past, which means there are likely groups out there that have cracked the problem and keeping it a secret). - AGI-in-the-basement scenario is very doable and has been or will be done, many times over.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    And your evidence for this claim is... what?
    - fizixer 6y ago
      A combination of: - sources available freely online - my own thought process and piecing of things together
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago

ausbah 6y ago

is x86 likely to ever go away, or anytime soon? asking as a non-systems guy

stjohnswarts 6y ago
Not for a long time. ARM is just more competition which is good. The guys claiming that Intel is basically a has been and can't make anything new don't know what they're talking about. Intel has come back more than once. Competition is good, I'm glad it's heating up a bit more these days.

hangonhn 6y ago

Anyone know the reason for the dominance of Power processors in the top 10 other than it's from IBM and they get a lot of contracts for HPC?

detaro 6y ago
They're fast, have lots of memory and IO bandwidth and can do some cool other tricks (I can't remember the name right now, but they have thing for PCIe devices to participate in cache coherency, their in-system protocols scale better to more CPUs, ...)
- gnufx 6y ago
  CAPI
  - detaro 6y ago
    exactly, thanks
hydroreadsstuff 6y ago
The main reason is the partnership with nvidia. You get nvlink to the CPU, which you don't get on Intel/AMD (I believe). Other than that, I don't think there is a real competitive reason. The support and future timeline from IBM is lacking. I'm honestly surprised they are still big friends.

Aaronstotle 6y ago

CoreTeks on youtube has a great video that explains the brilliance of this chip.

d_tr 6y ago
Good video indeed. Extra points for featuring Satoru Iwata!
tandr 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfHG7bj-CEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfHG7bj-CEI That video is from end of 2018... which makes it even more amazing.

flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago

There's something amusing about a blog post announcing the fastest computer in the world being unable to serve up web requests in under 10 seconds. (When I wrote this comment, I was seeing 500 status code errors when trying to load the page)

glouwbug 6y ago
True, but we can blame the programmer as we usually do

ClarkMills 6y ago

Ah but does it run Linux? [probably but couldn't see in the link] Looks like another nail in Intel's coffin...

akamoonknight 6y ago

Is there information on how the Fugaku machines are connected together? The highest performing Power9 ones seem to use InfiniBand, but is that still true with the ARM devices? Edit: seems to be a Fujitsu designed interconnect [0]. Wonder how much of the overall performance is dependent on the difference in communication. https://www.fujitsu.com/global/documents/solutions/business-technology/tc/catalog/08514929.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/documents/solutions/business-...

gnufx 6y ago
I don't know whats the best reference, but here's one: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/the-tofu-interconnect-d-for-supercomputer-fugaku.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/the-tofu-interconnect-...
- akamoonknight 6y ago
  Ah, much better than the white paper, thanks!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

cwaffles 6y ago

Backup link if you're getting http 503: http://archive.is/JSvCi http://archive.is/JSvCi

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Animats 6y ago

The end of the US semiconductor industry is now in sight. The only US owned state of the art fabs in the US belong to Intel. Intel survives because they have a high margin on x86 CPUs. Today, TMSC announced 5nm, and the top supercomputer is ARM-based. Apple seems to be going ARM. Chromebooks are ARM. Microsoft now offers Windows on ARM, on the Surface Pro X. Mobile never used x86. x86 is on the way out. What's left for Intel? (Micron is still a major force in DRAM, amazingly.)

floatboth 6y ago
> The only US owned state of the art fabs in the US belong to Intel Is the "US owned" clarification to exclude Global Foundries' New York fab? :D > Chromebooks are ARM Maybe half of them. > What's left for Intel? Fabricating others' designs like TSMC? But also, Intel isn't going away any time soon, just not being a monopoly anymore.
- Animats 6y ago
  Global Foundries New York fab (Fab 8), from Wikipedia: Technology: 28 nm and 14 nm. 7 nm planned. However, in August 2018, GlobalFoundries made the decision to suspend 7 nm development and planned production, citing the unaffordable costs to outfit Fab 8 for 7 nm production. GlobalFoundries held open the possibility of resuming 7 nm operations in the future if additional resources could be secured. So, not a state of the art fab. Couldn't afford to keep up.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    Yeah, not "state of the art" technically, but that's where the first generation Ryzens (14nm) were made, which still feels like yesterday to me, haha. "14nm" is still good enough, especially considering Intel's "10nm" vaporware..
    - fomine3 6y ago
      GF 14nm is still behind from Intel 14nm for actual size.

Symmetry 6y ago

For those interested in more details they did a presentation at Hot Chips. The slides are here: https://www.hotchips.org/hc30/2conf/2.13_Fujitsu_HC30.Fujitsu.Yoshida.rev1.2.pdf https://www.hotchips.org/hc30/2conf/2.13_Fujitsu_HC30.Fujits...

fomine3 6y ago

Green500 #1 is MN-3 by PFN that's also from Japan and they also use original chip!

IanCutress 6y ago
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15177/preferred-networks-a-500-w-custom-pcie-card-using-3000-mm2-silicon https://www.anandtech.com/show/15177/preferred-networks-a-50...

calaphos 6y ago

Even more impressive than the linpack result (2.8x faster than the runner up) is the HPCG result at 4.6x the result of summit in second place. That benchmark consists of more sparse matrixes which are a lot more realistic depiction of hpc workloads. Seems to scale a lot better with irregular access patterns than basically Nvidia GPUs on the other systems.

gnufx 6y ago

Perhaps it's worth pointing out some context. Given the remarkable predecessor, K Computer, this was only a matter of time. (I heard a great early talk on K, and I wish I knew the speaker for credit who was obviously working quite hard in English, but flawless, ending with basically we did it all ourselves largely de nuovo.) It seems that given the current circumstances, they haven't kept to schedule -- it was supposed to be operating next year. There's a lot non-mainstream in this, like K, but partly influenced by K experience. Unusually, it's all apparently specifically designed for the job, from the processor to the operating system (only partly GNU/Linux). Notably, despite the innovation, it should still run anything that can reasonably be built for aarch64 straight off and use the whole node, even if it doesn't run particularly fast; contrast GPU-based systems. (With something like simde, you may even be able to run typical x86-specific code.) However, the amount of memory/core is surprising -- even less than Blue Gene Q -- and I wonder how that works out for large-scale materials science work for which it's obviously prepared. Also note Fujitsu's consideration of reliability, though the oft-quoted theory of failure rates in exascale-ish machines was obviously wrong, otherwise as the Livermore CTO said, he'd be out of a job. The bad news for anyone potentially operating a similar system in a university, for instance, is that the typical nightmare proprietary software is apparently becoming available for it...

guicho271828 6y ago
FYI, https://github.com/fujitsu/A64FX https://github.com/fujitsu/A64FX
m_mueller 6y ago
Maybe you mean Matsuoka sensei? He's the director of RIKEN AICS since a couple of years and a known media figure in Japan.
- jabl 6y ago
  Satoshi Matsuoka is an "international rock star" in HPC circles. But I don't think he was involved with the K computer; before RIKEN he was IIRC at Tokyo Tech doing their "Tsubame" GPU clusters.

d_tr 6y ago

For what it's worth, Cray is also offering supercomputers with A64FX chips.

29athrowaway 6y ago

Some more information about Fugaku, aka Post-K, here: - Slides on Fugaku: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/supercomputer-fugaku.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/supercomputer-fugaku.p... - SVE 512 instructions for armv8: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/armv8-a-scalable-vector-extension-for-post-k.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/armv8-a-scalable-vecto...

cinntaile 6y ago

This kind of feels like a publicity stunt for Arm. Arm is owned by the Japanese company SoftBank and now Japan captures the supercomputer crown. I don't want to take away from the achievement and it's certainly possible that this is just a coincidence, maybe someone with more knowledge on the subject can comment on this?

lovemenot 6y ago
Fujitsu announced they would be building a Kei2 based on ARM, soon after their Kei was #1 around 5 years ago. ARM was a British company until it was bought by SoftBank a couple of years ago.