5 ms·
21 MW power! Insane. Interestingly, the second one is 30 MW.
by sriram_malhar 4y ago
21 MW power! Insane.
Interestingly, the second one is 30 MW.
- krylon 4y agoFor reference, Roadrunner, which was the first petascale system in 2008, used 2.35 MW (according to Wikipedia). So this one gives us 1,000 times the performance for 10 times the energy. From a performance/Watt perspective, this is an impressive improvement. EDIT: Wikipedia also says Roadrunner was not considered power-efficient in its day, which led to it being decommissioned after only five years of operation.
- porcoda 4y agoThat, and the apps teams hated the architecture given very poor tooling support - especially since the writing was on the wall that the future was GPGPU accelerators and the Cell was a dead end. The roadrunner processors were awesome on paper, but not so much when it came to working with them. Kind of a shame really: there were some really interesting ideas in that processor design.
- dekhn 4y agoTo me 50 megawatts is the baseline of what I would expect for a decent cluster.
- jeffbee 4y agoPerhaps you in fact forgot how to count lower than 50.
- ncmncm 4y agoThis is the first I have noticed them reporting power draw. It seems immoral to run it for anything that doesn't help stop global climate catastrophe. (Presumably global thermonuclear war would suffice. But carbon capture afterward would be hard to arrange for.) Wondering if they measure while benchmarking, or add up max power ratings of the chips. Did any old mainframe ever burn like that? E.g. the first big USAF missile tracking system, the one that filled four floors of a custom building?
- jeffbee 4y agoAre you kidding? You know a single widebody airliner uses more energy than that, right?
- ncmncm 4y agoWidebody airliners aren't doing much for the climate, either.
- ben_w 4y agoWhile true, I think the point is more about how minuscule 21 MW is when considered in isolation — 0.001 percent of global electricity usage.
- ncmncm 4y agoIn other news, only 100,000 of these would match the whole world's power draw.
- ben_w 4y agoIn the same way as it "only" costs 100,000 avocado toasts to buy a nice house.
- ncmncm 4y agoAnybody not boggled over the idea of their program burning 21 MW for as long as it runs either can never be impressed with anything, or has no head for numbers. Computation demanding power that could hurl a fully loaded jumbo jet into the sky is not something most of us will ever code.