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More context: This is related to today's release of the Spring Top 500 list (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=
by CaliforniaKarl 2y ago
More context: This is related to today's release of the Spring Top 500 list (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346788). Aurora rated 1,012.00 PetaFLOPS/second Rmax, and is in 2nd place, behind Frontier.
In the November 2023 list, Aurora was also in second place, with an Rmax of 585.34 PetaFLOPS/second.
See https://www.top500.org/system/180183/ https://www.top500.org/system/180183/ for the specs on Aurora, and https://www.top500.org/system/180047/ https://www.top500.org/system/180047/ for the specs on Frontier.
See https://www.top500.org/project/top500_description/ https://www.top500.org/project/top500_description/ and https://www.top500.org/project/linpack/ https://www.top500.org/project/linpack/ for a description of Rmax and the LINPACK benchmark, by which supercomputers are generally ranked. The Top 500 list only includes supercomputers that are able to run the LINPACK benchmark, and where the owner is willing to publish the results.
The jump in Aurora's Rmax scope is explained by Aurora's difficult birth. https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/5-years-late-only-2 https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/5-years-late-only-2 (published when the November 2023 list came out) has a good explanation of what's been going on.
- klysm 2y agoWhat does FLOPS/second mean? Isn’t FLOPS already per second? Are they accelerating?
- dragonwriter 2y agoYeah, the top500 pages cited use Flop/s (apparently using Flop for “Floating point operations” – not sure which “o” and “p” are used), I’ve could swear I’ve seen FLOPS and seen it expanded specifically as “FLoating point Operations Per Second” when I first encountered it, FLOPS/s seems to be using “FLOPS” like the “Flop” above (probably as “FLoating point OPerationS”, in which case the “/s” makes sense.)
- kortilla 2y agoSome people treat FLOPS as “FLoating point OPerationS”.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- seanw444 2y agoThen it should be "FLOPs" to indicate that the S is not separate word in the acronym, just the plural form.
- jonhohle 2y agoIt’s not an acronym, it’s an abbreviation. Unfortunately, the rules for abbreviations are effectively arbitrary (or specific to some etymology that’s not available from context). The “s” could be op(s) or seconds, but back in 90s trade publications it was seconds.
- vel0city 2y agoBut that doesn't make much sense in comparison to evaluating system performance. A Pentium III could have a billion FP32 operations given almost 16 years, but you wouldn't say its 1 GFLOPS. Assuming the "S" is seconds, it becomes a useful metric and we can say it has 2 FLOPS.
- falcor84 2y agoI'd actually be interested in an estimate of the world's overall flop/s^2. Could someone please run a back of the envelope calculation for me, e.g. looking at least year's data?
- greggsy 2y agoWe added 6.3 gigaFLOPS per second on 2022-23, based on an increase of 200 million gigaFLOPS observed on that period. This is in contrast to 20 gigaFLOPS per second in 2021-22. It’s nil in 2020-21, but that seems only partially attributable to the pandemic, as there appears to be a tick-tock pattern going back to 2013. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/supercomputer-power-flops https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/supercomputer-power-flops
- pyrale 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
- ngneer 2y agoMade me chuckle. F=ma, where a is the derivative of FLOPS with respect to time.
- imrehg 2y agoLooking at the two specs, interesting to see how Frontier (the first, running AMD CPUs) has much better power efficiency than Aurora (the second, running Intel), 18.89 kW/PFLOPS vs 38.24 kW/PFLOPS respectively... Good advertisement for AMD? :)
- pyrale 2y agoAlso the delta between theoretical performance and benchmarked performance is much smaller for Frontier (AMD) than for Aurora (Intel). That being said, note that the software is also different on the two computers.
- nolok 2y agoWouldn't be surprised if it's the same thing : more watt usage, more heat, more throttling.
- nolok 2y agoThese days this is true from top to bottom, desktop, servers, ... Even in gaming, the 7800X3D is cheaper than the 14700K, it is also more performant and yet uses roughly 20% less power at idle and the gap only grows at full charge. AMD's current architecture is very power responsible, and Intel has more or less used watt overfeeding to catch back in performance.
- qzw 2y agoIs there any good estimate of how much of AMD’s power efficiency advantage can be attributed to TSMC’s process vs Intel’s? I know in GPUs AMD doesn’t enjoy the same advantage vs nVidia since they’re both manufactured by TSMC, and with nVidia actually being on a smaller node, iirc.
- ChoGGi 2y ago7800x3d maxes out around 80 watts (has to be gentle to the vcache), the 14900k can go up to 300w (out of box, though Intel is issuing a new bios to limit that), and they trade blows in gaming. I would say that's a bit more than process efficiency? https://youtu.be/2MvvCr-thM8?t=423 https://youtu.be/2MvvCr-thM8?t=423
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- p1esk 2y agoNote all mentions of FLOPS in this thread refer to FP64 (double precision), unlike more popular “AI OPS”, which are typically INT8, specified for modern GPUs.
- kkielhofner 2y ago> which are typically INT8 These systems are used for training which is VERY rarely INT8. On Frontier, for example, it's recommended to use bfloat16 or float32 if that doesn't work for you/your application. Nvidia has FP8 with >=Hopper and supposedly AMD MI300 has it as well although I have no experience with the MI300 so I can't speak to that.
- verandaguy 2y agoI don't know anything about supercomputer architecture; are lifetime upgrades that double the performance typical, let alone YoY? What do those kinds of upgrades entail from a hardware side? Software side? Is this just a horizontal scaling of a cluster?
- CaliforniaKarl 2y agoThis isn’t really an upgrade, it’s the system still being commissioned. See the last paragraph of my post for a link to more info.