SuperComputing 2017 Slideshow

[Guest]

We prowled around SuperComputing 2017 to gather all the most interesting displays at the show.

SuperComputing 2017 Slideshow : Read more

 

[germz1986]

A few of these slides displayed ads instead of the content, or displayed a blank slide. Your website is becoming hard to read on due to all of the ads....

 

[berezini]

the whole thing is advertisement, soon toms hardware will be giving out recommended products based on commission they get from sales.

 

[FritzEiv]

Due to some technical issues, our normal company video player has some implementation issues when we use videos (instead of still images) in slideshows. We went in and replaced all of those with YouTube versions of the videos on the slides in question, and it looks to be working correctly now. I apologize for the technical difficulty.

(I'd rather not turn the comments on this slideshow into an ad referendum. Please know that I make sure concerns about ads/ad behavior/ad density (including concerns I see mentioned in article comments) reach the right ears. You can feel free to message me privately at any time.)

 

[COLGeek]

Some amazing tech showcased here. Just imagine the possibilities. It will be interesting to ponder on the influences to the prosumer/consumer markets.

 

[bit_user]

The single-socket ThunderX2 system proved to be faster in OpenFOAM and NEMO tests, among several others.

Qualcomm's CPU has also posted some impressive numbers and, while I've no doubt these are on benchmarks that scale well to many cores, this achievement shouldn't be underestimated. I think 2017 will go down in the history of computing as an important milestone in ARM's potential domination of the cloud.

 

[bit_user]

IBM's Power Systems AC922 nodes serve as the backbone of Summit's bleeding-edge architecture.

"bleeding edge" at least used to have the connotation of something that wasn't quite ready for prime-time - like beta quality - or even alpha. However, I suspect that's not what you mean to say, here.

 

[bit_user]

NEC is the last company in the world to manufacture Vector processors.

This is a rather funny claim.

I think the point might be that it's the last proprietary SIMD CPU to be used exclusively in HPC? Because SIMD is practically everywhere you look. It graced x86 under names like MMX, SSE, and now the AVX family of extensions. Even ARM has had it for more than a decade, and it's a mandatory part of ARMv8-A. Modern GPUs are deeply SIMD, hybridized with massive SMT (according to https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/inside-volta/ a single V100 can concurrently execute up to 164k threads).

Anyway, there are some more details on it, here:

http://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/hpc/sx/architecture.html

I don't see anything remarkable about it, other than how primitive it is by comparison with modern GPUs and CPUs. Rather than award it a badge of honor, I think it's more of a sign of the degree of government subsidies in this sector.

Both this thing and the PEZY-SC2 are eyebrow-raising in the degree to which they differ from GPUs. Whenever you find yourself building something for HPC that doesn't look like a modern GPU, you have to ask why. There are few cases I can see that could possibly justify using either of these instead of a V100. And for those, Xeon Phi stands as a pretty good answer for HPC workloads that demand something more closely resembling a conventional CPU.

 

[bit_user]

The network infrastructure required to run a massive tradeshow may not seem that exciting, but Supercomputing 17's SCinet network is an exception.

Thanks for this - I didn't expect it to be so extensive, but then I didn't expect they'd have access to "3.63 Tb/s of WAN bandwidth" (still, OMG).

What I was actually wondering about was the size of friggin' power bill for this conference! Did they have to make any special arrangements to power all the dozens-kW display models mentioned? I'd imagine the time of year should've helped with the air conditioning bill.

 

[cpsalias]

For more details on picture 27 - MicroDataCenter visit http://www.zurich.ibm.com/microserver/

 

[Saga Lout]

For more details on picture 27 - MicroDataCenter visit http://www.zurich.ibm.com/microserver/

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