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> Just because you didn't do well in your systems classes or you think spinning up an EC2 instance on AWS is "easy" doesn't mean it's an easy problem. Please l

> Just because you didn't do well in your systems classes or you think spinning up an EC2 instance on AWS is "easy" doesn't mean it's an easy problem. Please leave personal attacks out of this, it is not in the spirit of HN, or in helping to see people's perspectives. I'm not saying its not a hard problem, not at all. I respect the hell out of the work that has been done here. I'm saying that the sound barrier is called a barrier for a very good reason. Aerodynamics on one side of the sound barrier are different than aerodynamics on the other. It is a different game entirely. That is why it is considered a barrier. A plane that has superb subsonic aerodynamics will not perform well on the other side of that barrier Exascale computers on the other hand, while truly amazing, are not operating differently by hitting 10^18 FLOPS. If you're computer does 10^18 -20 FLOPS it is not operating in a fundamentally different set of rules than one running above the exaflop benchmark. I never said that the achievement wasn't laudable. I argued that there is no barrier there. If I'm wrong I would appreciate you explaining why doing things at 10^18 FLOPS is fundamentally different than computing just below that benchmark.

alephnerd 2y ago
Because the unit used to measure IO is FLOPS [0], and most societies have settled on base-10 as their numerical system of choice for thousands of years. Furthermore, it is not possible to predict the exact number of cycles you'll need, since that depends on the architecture, compiler and many other factors. This is why FLOPS are used as the unit of choice. Each jump in flops by a magnitude of 10^3 is a significant problem in concurrency, IO, parallelism, storage, and existing compute infrastructure. Managing racks is difficult, managing concurrent workloads is difficult, managing I/O and storage is difficult, designing compute infra like FPGAs/GPUs/CPUs for this is difficult, etc. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  So its just an arbitrary base-10 number, and not a constraint imposed by physics or some other outside constraint like the sound barrier? That's kind of my point, an Exaflop is a benchmark and not a 'barrier'. The sound barrier wasn't a 10^3 change in speed, the difference between a subsonic plane and a supersonic plane is measured in percentages when it comes to speed, e.g. a plane that is happy at .8 Mach for a top speed is going to be designed under a completely different set of rules than one that tops out at 1.2 Mach. Again, I'm not saying that the accomplishments are insignificant, I'm just arguing press-release semantics here.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    If you're not being facetious I recommend listening to the 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Award Winner lecture. What you're doing is the equivalent of asking why do we use Gigabyte or Terabyte as a metric. Just reaching 10^12 floating point operations per second was not something that was done until 2018.
    - kortilla 2y ago
      No, it’s not equivalent at all. Nobody is asking about the unit of measure.

alephnerd 2y ago

Because the unit used to measure IO is FLOPS [0], and most societies have settled on base-10 as their numerical system of choice for thousands of years. Furthermore, it is not possible to predict the exact number of cycles you'll need, since that depends on the architecture, compiler and many other factors. This is why FLOPS are used as the unit of choice. Each jump in flops by a magnitude of 10^3 is a significant problem in concurrency, IO, parallelism, storage, and existing compute infrastructure. Managing racks is difficult, managing concurrent workloads is difficult, managing I/O and storage is difficult, designing compute infra like FPGAs/GPUs/CPUs for this is difficult, etc. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

dghlsakjg 2y ago
So its just an arbitrary base-10 number, and not a constraint imposed by physics or some other outside constraint like the sound barrier? That's kind of my point, an Exaflop is a benchmark and not a 'barrier'. The sound barrier wasn't a 10^3 change in speed, the difference between a subsonic plane and a supersonic plane is measured in percentages when it comes to speed, e.g. a plane that is happy at .8 Mach for a top speed is going to be designed under a completely different set of rules than one that tops out at 1.2 Mach. Again, I'm not saying that the accomplishments are insignificant, I'm just arguing press-release semantics here.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  If you're not being facetious I recommend listening to the 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Award Winner lecture. What you're doing is the equivalent of asking why do we use Gigabyte or Terabyte as a metric. Just reaching 10^12 floating point operations per second was not something that was done until 2018.
  - kortilla 2y ago
    No, it’s not equivalent at all. Nobody is asking about the unit of measure.