News AMD Supercomputers Heading to NOAA Will Predict Weather With 327,680 Zen 2 Cores

[Admin]

The NOAA announced that it will install two new AMD Epyc-based supercomputers for weather forecasting.

AMD Supercomputers Heading to NOAA Will Predict Weather With 327,680 Zen 2 Cores : Read more

 

[spongiemaster]

The NOAA announced that it will install two new AMD Epyc-based supercomputers for weather forecasting.

AMD Supercomputers Heading to NOAA Will Predict Weather With 327,680 Zen 2 Cores : Read more

Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to order a Farmers' Almanac off of Amazon?

 

[svan71]

Why do they state the core count rather than cpu count?

 

[OMGPWNTIME]

Why do they state the core count rather than cpu count?

A system of 64-Core chips totalling 327,680 cores would mean 5120 CPUs.

An interesting thing to consider is that while I'm sure you get a discount for ordering a massive number of CPUs, the MSRP of the 7742 processor is $6950, which would mean in excess of $35 million in CPUs alone.

 

[svan71]

my question was sarcastic really, 327,680 sounds allot more exciting than 5120 .

 

[drivinfast247]

my question was sarcastic really, 327,680 sounds allot more exciting than 5120 .

Or transistor count 163,840,000,000,000

 

[ron baker]

This will use so much Powa that it will create its own weather systems near the Heat exfiltration systems. Someone needs to develop a seriously effiient design 5-10w per core , not this 60-90w nonsense. Back to the drawing board Mr Cray!

 

[aldaia]

This will use so much Powa that it will create its own weather systems near the Heat exfiltration systems. Someone needs to develop a seriously effiient design 5-10w per core , not this 60-90w nonsense. Back to the drawing board Mr Cray!

AMD EPYC 7742 requires less than 4 W per CORE

 

[bit_user]

Each machine will have 1.3 petabytes of system memory and Cray’s ClusterStor systems will come with 26 petabytes of storage per site.

That makes it sound like each 2-processor node will have 1.3 PB. In fact, if this number is for the whole site, then each node would have about 512 GB. So, that must be what it's describing.

Incidentally, 26 PB only works out to 10 TB per node, which is fairly unremarkable. The flash storage is only about 256 GB per node.

What's so strange about this is no mention of GPUs. The numbers check out, though. 12 PFLOPS works out to about 5 TFLOPS per node, which is in the ballpark of 2x 64-core EPYCs, and pretty low for anything more than a single GPU per node. In fact, a single Tesla V100 is rated at 7 TFLOPS of fp64. Or, sticking with AMD, a MI60 would net you 7.4 TFLOPS of fp64.

So, either their algorithms don't map well to GPUs, or maybe they involve a lot of legacy code that would be too painful to port. I'd expect they'd want to use deep learning models, though. GPUs would provide the best balance of versatility and performance, for a mix of deep learning & conventional models.

 

[bit_user]

Someone needs to develop a seriously effiient design 5-10w per core , not this 60-90w nonsense. Back to the drawing board Mr Cray!

What are you even talking about? Where did you get those numbers?

FWIW, Seymour Cray died in 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray

That was several years after he spun off Cray Computer, which went bankrupt in 1995. So, he's had nothing to do with Cray Research for about 30 years, now.

 

[bit_user]

In an ironic twist, if you'd asked me what I'd do with access to a Cray, until a couple years ago, I'd have said something to the effect of "realtime raytracing would be a good start". Now, here we have a Cray that doesn't even have GPUs, each of which would be the most suitable platform for such an endeavor. My, how things change.

At this point, I think my brain is the limiting factor. I can't think of anything especially interesting to do on such a machine.