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Bound for a 2021 market release; Intel will have transitioned to its advanced 7 nm EUV silicon fabrication node on the CPU front, and has adopted an "enterprise-first" strategy for the node. LGA4677 will be designed to handle the extremely high bandwidth of PCI-Express Gen 5

Waco wrote:

I'll be shocked if pcie 5 is shipping in 21 in anything Intel except Aurora...if even there.

Captain Ned wrote:

Why do I think you'll be the first to know?

JustAnEngineer wrote:

LGA4677 Sapphire Rapids:
https://www.techpowerup.com/260119/inte ... is-lga4677

Bound for a 2021 market release; Intel will have transitioned to its advanced 7 nm EUV silicon fabrication node on the CPU front, and has adopted an "enterprise-first" strategy for the node. LGA4677 will be designed to handle the extremely high bandwidth of PCI-Express Gen 5

The Cray Shasta will be deployed in the US Navy's Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The peak theoretical computing capability of 12.8 PetaFLOPS will be built with 290,304 AMD EPYC (Rome) processor cores and 112 NVIDIA Volta V100 General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs). The system will also feature 590 total terabytes (TB) of memory and 14 petabytes (PB) of usable storage, including 1 PB of NVMe-based solid state storage. Cray's Slingshot network will make sure all those components talk to each other at a rate of 200 Gigabits per second

The UK government has set aside a budget of 1.56 billion US Dollars to install the world's most powerful supercomputer used for weather forecasting in the year 2022. Previously, the UK government used three Cray XC40 supercomputers that are capable of achieving a maximum of 14 PetaFLOPs at its peak performance. The future system plans to take that number and make it look tiny. With plans to make it 20 times more powerful than the current machine, we can estimate that the future supercomputer will have above 200 PetaFLOPs of computing performance.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Europe's AMD-powered Big Iron has been announced. It's just EPYC for 1/6th the price, though, not GPUs:
https://hothardware.com/news/amd-epyc-2 ... ercomputer

blastdoor wrote:

A CPU-only machine is definitely closer to being something I could actually use, but I think I'd be hard-pressed to actually use 748,544 cores .

10k cores, sure. But 748,544? That's a lot of cores.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

You could simulate SkyNet...

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

You could simulate SkyNet...

Answer by Fredric Brown, 1954

just brew it! wrote:

I've always wondered why Asimov assumed we would be using electromechanical relays to implement computer circuits in the year 2061, when vacuum tubes were already in widespread use when that story was written.

Captain Ned wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

I've always wondered why Asimov assumed we would be using electromechanical relays to implement computer circuits in the year 2061, when vacuum tubes were already in widespread use when that story was written.

It explained why Multivac was so big??

U.S. Department of Energy now expects El Capitan to reach 2 exaflops once it’s fully installed, which would cement its place at the top of the US’s supercomputer inventory. El Capitan comes with a $600 million price tag and is intended to ensure the US’s leadership in supercomputers in the exascale era. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be using the system to replace Sierra, their current IBM Power 9 + NVIDIA Volta supercomputer. All told, El Capitan will be 16 times more powerful than the system it replaces. LLNL will be using it primarily for nuclear weapons modeling – substituting for actual weapon testing – while the system will also see secondary use as a research system in other fields, particularly those where machine learning can be applied.

On the CPU side of matters, AMD will be supplying a standard version of their Zen 4-based “Genoa” EPYC processor. As it’s still two generations out from AMD’s current wares, the amount of information on Zen 4/Genoa is limited, but AMD is promising support for next-generation memory, Infinity Fabric 3, as well as broad promises of both single and multi-threaded performance leadership.

Meanwhile on the GPU side of matters, AMD and Cray are continuing to hold their cards rather close. While the companies are confirming that this will use a next-generation AMD GPU using a new architecture, they aren’t naming the architecture or offering too much in the way of details about it. For now, what they are saying is that these GPUs will be using next-generation HBM for their memory, and that they’ll bring support for mixed precision compute for improved deep learning performance.

For the first time AMD is naming their Infinity Fabric 3.0, which will be used to connect the processors within each blade. Like Frontier, El Capitan will be running in a 4:1 configuration, with four GPUs hooked up to each CPU. For Infinity Fabric 3.0, AMD is promising further improvements to inter-chip bandwidth and latency. However the most interesting claim is that these IF 3.0 device nodes will support unified memory across the CPU and GPU, which is something AMD doesn’t offer today. Indeed even Frontier is only slated to offer coherency between the processors which is a step below a true unified memory model. The devil is in the details of course – a unified memory system does not necessarily mean fast access to other devices’ memory – but this stands to be a major leap for AMD as a unified memory system can improve both the ease in programming such a system, and improving its performance when running heterogeneous workloads.

Finally, as previously mentioned, tying together the nodes will be Cray’s own Slingshot interconnect. Among other things, Slingshot supports adaptive routing, congestion management, and quality-of-service features. The interconnect is capable of 200Gb/sec per port, with individual blades incorporating a port for each GPU in the blade so that other nodes can directly read and write data to a GPU’s memory.

El Capitan is slated to use less than 40MW of power – and we’re told it’ll be "fairly substantially under that" – however at this time the DOE isn’t disclosing the total number of cabinets. But to put things in comparison, Frontier is slated to use 100 Shasta cabinets, with a total power budget lower than El Capitan. So we wouldn’t be too surprised to ultimately find out that part of the reason that El Capitan is 33% faster than Frontier is due to the DOE throwing more hardware at it and ordering more cabinets. But whatever the number, it’s going to be enough that El Capitan will be using direct liquid cooling.

Overall, El Capitan marks an important second exascale supercomputer win for AMD, while Cray will now be involved in all three US exascale systems. So it’s a big win for both vendors, and a continuation of momentum for AMD, who only just scored its first big supercomputer win in a long while with Frontier last year. The fact that El Capitan is a derivative of Frontier also means that with all three exascale systems now locked in, it will be NVIDIA who finds themselves on the outside looking in for this generation. As we noted with the Frontier announcement, the Intel Aurora and the AMD Frontier/El Capitan systems are coming from full-service processor vendors that supply both CPUs and GPUs. Current-generation systems like Summit use mixed vendors – e.g. IBM + NVIDIA – so the move to integrated vendors is a big shift for these CPU + accelerator systems. And while it makes a lot of sense for LLNL to order a copy of one of the other exascale systems in the name of efficiency, it should be noted that US DOE supercomputer contracts are as much political as they are technical. The US has a vested interest in supporting a domestic supercomputer industry and ensuring there are viable competitors to help keep costs down (there used to be several), so with three major processor alliances/vendors in the US, someone was bound to end up the odd man out.

At any rate, El Capitan is scheduled for delivery in early 2023.

Captain Ned wrote:

Waco's new toy.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the mission high-performance computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has moved another step closer to making Perlmutter - its next-generation GPU-accelerated supercomputer - available to the science community in 2020.

A Cray Shasta supercomputer will feature 24 cabinets and provide 3-4 times the capability of NERSC's current supercomputer, Cori. Perlmutter will be deployed at NERSC in two phases: the first set of 12 cabinets, featuring GPU-accelerated nodes, will arrive in late 2020; the second set, featuring CPU-only nodes, will arrive in mid-2021. A 35-petabyte all-flash Lustre-based file system using HPE's ClusterStor E1000 hardware will also be deployed in late 2020. More than 6,000 next-generation NVIDIA GPU processors will power Perlmutter alongside the heterogeneous system's AMD CPUs. Nearly half of the workload currently running at NERSC is poised to take advantage of GPU acceleration.