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Some may not want to hear this, but these “fastest supercomputer” list is now meaningless because all the Chinese labs have started obfuscating their progress.
by balia 2y ago
Some may not want to hear this, but these “fastest supercomputer” list is now meaningless because all the Chinese labs have started obfuscating their progress.
A while ago there were a few labs in China in top 10 and they all attracted sanctions / bad attention. Now no Chinese lab report any data now
- pknomad 2y agoI wouldn't say meaningless... just incomplete.
- leptons 2y agoI doubt the US Government is telling everyone about their fastest computer.
- grapesodaaaaa 2y agoThe DOE has entered the chat. (after the nuclear test ban treaty, they run a LOT of simulations)
- buildbot 2y agoIsn't that the open secret for El Cap? "Classified workloads" aka weapons sims.
- sliken 2y agoNot a secret, from IEEE: The NNSA—which oversees Lawrence Livermore as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories—plans to use El Capitan to “model and predict nuclear weapon performance, aging effects, and safety,”
- leptons 2y agoThere's no real secret about nuclear weapons simulations. Sure the software they use is protected and "secret", but the real secret computing facilities are likely there to break encryption and spy on everyone. Nuclear weapons simulations don't really give the US a tactical advantage, but breaking encryption does, and so that kind of compute power would be kept secret.
- buildbot 2y agoUnless it's like, air gapped powered by a naval nuclear reactor, I feel like someone would question why a random US gov building is drawing 20-30MW of power, and exhausting most of that as heat...
- ethbr1 2y agoAside from the utility, who would know? There's a lot of land out there, relative to the size of even a very large building.
- remram 2y agoNot disagreeing with you but how could any building draw power without radiating most of it as heat?
- wang_li 2y agoHow do you tell the difference between a datacenter and a supercomputer cluster? According to wikipedia, the government data center in Utah is pulling 65 MW.
- cameron_b 2y agoThey are in good company, with X, Meta, Microsoft and others not reporting theirs either. The basis for the ranking was a cumulative tracking of benchmark results that were required as part of commissioning bespoke computers. A contract would be written to buy a computer that could achieve a certain performance in operations per second, and in order to satisfy that the benchmarks were agreed to and codified in the contracts. Government contracts are to a certain extent public information so the goals and clout of successive performance were tracked in this way. If you don’t need to satisfy a government contract, or don’t need the clout to attract engineers or funding, submitting results draws unwanted attention to what you’re cooking up.
- sliken 2y agoMicrosoft has the #4 cluster on the top 500 list. Sure not everyone reports, still seems like a useful list to watch the trends in computing and in particular HPC. Keep in mind the average hyperscalers cloud is not a particularly good setup for the top500. HPC tends towards more bandwidth, lower latency, and no virtualization.
- robocat 2y agoFolding-at-home reports theirs. 2020: "Folding@home project passes 2.4 ExaFLOPS, more than the top 500 supercomputers combined" https://www.techspot.com/news/84832-foldinghome-project-passes-24-exaflops-more-than-top.html https://www.techspot.com/news/84832-foldinghome-project-pass...