AMD's EPYC Milan and Nvidia's "Volta-Next" GPUs Combine To Power Shasta Supercomputer

Mar 31, 2018
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Will it be obsolete in 5-10 years (Moore's law now says silicon transistors can only keep shrinking for another 5 years), and the DOE have to replace it?
 

Feldmarshall

Distinguished
Dec 21, 2004
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DOE has a history of running AMD based supercomputers by CRAY. Jaguar (located at Oak Ridge Laboratory) was at some point upgraded thanks to AMDs long support of the socket. The computer was stopped, each blade was opened and all Opteron processors were switched to latest 4-core versions (I believe from mix of 1- and 2-core). And it cost only the price of the processors - all other hardware stayed the same. With the price of custom super-computing hardware they must still remember how nice the columns added up on that :).

By the way - if you are really interested in what DOE runs on those supercomputers see https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/leadership-science/ - here is a list of projects running at one of DOE computing centers.
 


That's the official list anyway.
 

bit_user

Polypheme
Ambassador

Yeah, it helps being in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal.

This is the same department that its head (Rick Perry) said during a Presidential primary debate that he wanted to de-fund it. Except he couldn't even remember its name.

I guess he now has a better appreciate for its mission, given that his FY2019 budget request actually contains a $500M increase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Energy#Budget