What I Learned at the International Supercomputing Conference

By Michael Feldman

June 23, 2011

Flying halfway around the world to just gather news seems like a waste of time in the information age. But when it comes to supercomputing shows like ISC, being there in person cannot be duplicated by the remote experience, despite live streaming sessions, video blogs, and ISC twitter feeds.

Part of that has to do with the fact that information just seems to flow more freely under the chaotic conditions of a busy show floor. The other aspect is that exhibitors assume they’re talking to potential prospects, so the vendors tend to be a little looser lipped than I’m used to as a journalist.

For example, although Intel wasn’t willing to share with me over email last week that their first Many Integrated Core (MIC) product, aka Knights Corner, would support ECC memory, one person in the Intel booth at ISC did indeed confirm that MIC would be released with such support. (The Knights Ferry prototype is using a vanilla, i.e., non-ECC, graphics memory controller.) Like I mentioned in my original reporting of this week’s MIC news, it would be inconceivable not to have ECC support in this HPC product, so no big surprise here.

I also found out that the peak performance on the Knights Ferry prototype is 1.2 single precision (SP) teraflops. Given that the next year’s Knights Corner product will be on 22nm technology and will have about twice as many cores, I expect it will at least double that SP floating point teraflops, with maybe half the number for double precision (DP).

The GPU contingent from AMD won’t be intimidated from such floppery though. They told me that the next version of the FireStream HPC product will have twice the performance of the current model. The 9350 and 9370 products being shipped today deliver 528 DP gigaflops and 2.64 SP teraflops. The new FireStreams will be announced this fall — around SC11, I’m guessing — and will start shipping sometime in early 2012.

Meanwhile NVIDIA says it will deliver its next generation Kepler GPU architecture in 2012, At an ISC presentation by Nvidian Sumit Gupta, he estimated the new GPU will deliver about 5 DP gigaflops per watt, or maybe even better than that. “Kepler is going to be an amazing performance per watt GPU,” he promised.

If NVIDIA maintains the same thermal envelope as the current Fermi-class devices (225-250 watts), then the Kepler GPUs will be well north of a double precision teraflop. In fact all three 2012 HPC accelerators look to top one DP teraflop, but it is unlikely that any will reach 2 teraflops. With that kind of performance parity, the competitive differentiators may be energy efficiency and ease of programming.

In the latter case, Intel may have the edge. I heard a number of comments here in Hamburg that MIC is more straightforward to program than a GPU, at least to get an initial, non-optimized port — not just because it’s based on the x86 architecture, but because it lends itself more easily to standard multicore-style programming frameworks, like OpenMP. That indeed will warm the hearts of many application developers, inasmuch as a lots of code is already parallelized with OpenMP.

On the other hand, CUDA remains the more mature software environment for manycore acceleration at this point, and AMD said that the upcoming FireStream offerings will also include more advanced tools, libraries, and drivers. In any case, software development for accelerator programming is bound to get easier over the next year, but the devil will be in the details.

On the energy efficiency front, it looks like all three HPC accelerator offerings will need at least need 200 watts to hit a teraflop. It remains to be seen if Intel, NVIDIA, or AMD will have any appreciable edge.

On the broader topic of energy efficiency, there was lots of chatter at the conference about exascale power budgets. The current goal of US federal agencies is to have an exaflop fit into 20MW. That means to run such a system will cost about $20 million per year in the US and 20 million euros in Europe. Unfortunately, a number of people in the know at ISC thought that was quite an optimistic figure for the first exaflop systems. Estimates for these early machines ranged from as much 40MW (Cray CTO Steve Scott) to 200 MW (LSU prof Thomas Sterling).

The power problem is not a showstopper though. There are 100MW datacenters today and if the political will is there to fund power-sucking monsters at this scale, it could be done. Eventually exaflop systems will use 20MW, and less, but perhaps not the first crop of machines.

On a related note, Japan’s March 11 earthquake/tsunami disaster is already forcing that nation’s HPC community to deal with reduced power availability. Not that they weren’t already focused on energy efficiency. Japanese supercomputing has always had to adhere to strict power budgets since the nation lacks significant indigenous energy resources. But the situation is especially acute right now.

In a presentation at ISC, the University of Tsukuba’s Taisuke Boku told the audience that in the wake of the disaster, four one-gigawatt power plants are now offline. According to him, Tokyo residents, businesses, and other organizations (including HPC centers) will be required to cut their power usage by 15 percent this summer because of the downed plants.

Boku said this summer the university’s PACS-CS supercomputer will be shut down during the day, from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, to deal with the power restriction shortage. And this is expected to continue for a number of years while Japan rebuilds its power plant infrastructure. The irony here is that PACS-CS uses low voltage Xeons, so is already is built for energy-efficient operation.

An even bigger irony is that the Japanese K Computer, which captured the number one spot on the TOP500 list is using about 10MW. The fact that an 8-petaflop machine uses half the 20MW that people are aiming for in an exaflop machine should be sobering enough. The bigger problem though is that power consumption for the top systems is increasing faster than gains in energy efficiency. As we say in the HPC biz, that doesn’t scale.

I actually have more to report from my Hamburg excursion, including some interesting developments to create net zero carbon HPC datacenters. But that will have to wait for another time.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire