Comments on: The Stepping Stones In America To Exascale And Beyond https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/10/08/the-stepping-stones-in-america-to-exascale-and-beyond/ In-depth coverage of high-end computing at large enterprises, supercomputing centers, hyperscale data centers, and public clouds. Thu, 17 Oct 2024 01:50:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 By: HuMo https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/10/08/the-stepping-stones-in-america-to-exascale-and-beyond/#comment-237195 Wed, 09 Oct 2024 22:24:30 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=144789#comment-237195 A great rectification of the subliminal order of HPC things, rightwards, and upwards! And right in time for the 1-month countdown to the ballroom championship of supercomputing extravaganza that is SC24 (17–22 Nov’24, Atlanta, GA)! (within walking distance of Boone, NC!)

Can’t wait to see the suplex rhumba of the swashbuckling stronger swagger of El Capitan in full Kung Fu action on the dancefloor! Not to mention the tilt-a-whirl wheelbarrow tango of post-physiotherapy Sleeping Beauty, Aurora rising, from the countless kisses of dedicated (frogs) engineers, with wonderful hearts!

Which Frontier of computational choreography will they break this time? Will Fugaku’s Jujutsu be enough for it to keep its HPCG championship belt? Will the JEDI remain #1 at Green500? Will Sleeping Beauty fend off competitors on MxP? Who will steal the HPL crown from Frontier? And what of Graph500 and Io500? So many questions, so much suspense, and so many days of agony to wait for the answers! 8^b

]]> By: Paul Berry https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/10/08/the-stepping-stones-in-america-to-exascale-and-beyond/#comment-237188 Wed, 09 Oct 2024 20:16:05 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=144789#comment-237188 Upgrading Machines –
If there were viable socket compatible upgrades that offered at least 2x performance benefit in the same thermal envelope, I bet you would see upgrades. That made a lot of sense when going from dual-core sockets to 6-core sockets in the same footprint.

]]> By: Henry https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/10/08/the-stepping-stones-in-america-to-exascale-and-beyond/#comment-237184 Wed, 09 Oct 2024 17:48:49 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=144789#comment-237184 > Why aren’t exascale-class machines upgraded?
A number of possibilities come to mind. If a system is intended as a NNSA “capability” machine (one application running on the entire system), rather than a “capacity” system (multiple, simultaneous, smaller jobs), there’s a big benefit to having a homogeneous (all nodes identical) design, rather than one that’s got multiple generations of CPUs, different B/F ratios for memory bandwidth, etc.
Another possibility has to do with the difficulty in planning for the interconnect network to span several generations of processors if you don’t want the final generation of CPU/GPU nodes to be hampered by a years-old network.
And tangentially, there may be some procurement and funding issues associated with trying to get an upgradeable system where much of the cost winds up front-end loaded.

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