DARESBURY HOSTS MACHINE EVALUATION WORKSHOP

December 1, 2000

by Christopher Lazou

San Diego, CALIF. — Some 130 people from computer vendors, computer service providers and researchers in scientific fields, a few from industry, but mostly from UK universities, attended the 11th machine evaluation workshop at EPSRC Daresbury Laboratories, UK. Of great interest were the Beowulf solutions, where clusters can be cobbled from favoured commodity Chips and Interconnect Network to fit one’s pocket, and hopefully computing needs.

This established workshop provided a plethora of distributed memory benchmark results on the latest products from vendors using their latest chips. The benchmark suite used consists of many computational chemistry kernel codes, molecular dynamics, Quantum Monte Carlo, Jacobi Solver, STREAM – measured sustainable memory bandwidth in HPC (TRIAD), the Ab Initio molecular electronic structure, the DL_POLY, parallel molecular dynamics benchmark, developed by Daresbury. The suite also includes SPECfp95 and other well known benchmarks. Martin Guest and other Daresbury staff described their benchmark findings, comparing the cost/performance of many available systems.

The rest consisted of vendor presentations, user experience in building their own Beowulf clusters and presentations from a small number of companies specialising in providing Beowulf solutions from commodity components on demand. Instead of buying pre-packaged products from traditional vendors, a cluster can be cobbled from favoured Chips and Interconnect Network to fit one’s pocket and hopefully satisfy computational needs.

Vendor presentations included the new IBM RS/6000 Power 4 chip and its promise of a theoretical peak performance of 140 Gflop/s on a 32-way board; the SGI Origin3000 based on MIPs technology and their road map showing developments until year 2005; the Compaq Alpha EV7, the Sun Microsystems Ultra SPARC and so on. I would not bore you here with details as I am sure they have been reported in articles on SC2000 in Dallas only recently.

At this workshop only NEC was representing the heavy weights of parallel vector processor supercomputing. Toine Becker, gave a brief history of the CMOS version of the SX-4 and SX-5 systems. He re-iterated NEC’s commitment to PVP systems with improved speeds, the SX-6 in year 2002 and an SX-7 in year 2003+. He also briefly described the Earth Simulator with its 40 Tflop/s peak performance.

In Europe, NEC is concentrating in capability computing whilst in Japan is strong in capacity, the server commercial market. It is involved in the AzusA/AsamA IA-64 project, to place 4 CPUs in a box. Each CPU runs at 800 MHz, 1.6 Gflop/s. AzusA is a 16 way IA-64, the AsamA is a McKinley 32 way which is planned for year 2002. A 64 to 512 way (32 way xN) node is expected by year 2005. Note that in the McKinley and Madison chips, vectors are introduced, which will bring costs down dramatically for HPC systems.

What has transpired is that almost all vendors though continuing their own product line, are also actively planning to incorporate the Intel IA-64 Chip, and its successors McKinley and Madison, in their near future server products. Indeed, the speaker from HP, having described their current PA-RISC line, proceeded to say that HP anchored their business, gambled the whole company, on the success of the IA-64 architecture.

The exception is Sun Microsystems which is sticking to its RISC technology. HPC vendors are also busy open sourcing their compilers and other software tools for Redhat, Susa, and Turbo LINUX, which they intend to use on the Intel IA-64.

There is now general agreement that what ever else, “the ASCI experience taught us, memory bandwidth and latency are the key components which will deliver performance. Without doubt a fast memory sub-system is critical for high sustained performance; and in addition, with the advent of multi-level cache Chips, compiler technology is becoming very important for extracting performance”. At present processor speed is increasing faster than memory and compiler technology. This means that sustained performance would be but a shadow of peak. What vendors are promising is 100 Tflop/s peak by year 2004-5, at a price of $2 per Mflop/s. Sun Microsystems goes even further claiming they would offer HPC for $500/Gflop/s with their 128 CPUs “Javawulf” cluster by year 2003. They plan to offer Java based HPC which should allow applications to run on anyone’s hardware. SUN claims they are undercutting an Intel environment by at least 20%.

Copyright: Christopher Lazou, HiPerCom Consultants, Ltd., UK. Email: [email protected]

============================================================

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