News Supercomputing icon warns that China could have the world's fastest supercomputers

[Admin]

China's government no longer wants to disclose performance of supercomputers, which creates suspicions in the U.S.

Supercomputing icon warns that China could have the world's fastest supercomputers : Read more

 

[ex_bubblehead]

A preemptive warning to all. Keep politics of ANY kind out of the conversation. Anyone that goes there will find themselves locked out of the thread or worse.

 

[foogoo]

Good for them if they do. They also may or may not have a Time Machine and an army of Sasquatch riding unicorns I read.

 

[bit_user]

The phrase "Supercomputing Icon" in the headline immediately had me thinking like...

​

Heh, but I knew it must be Jack Dongarra. He seems to pop up in the news quite regularly.

 

[COLGeek]

What is amusing is how something like this gets folks riled up. These "rankings" change all the time and it generates competition and innovation.

Instead of getting so parochial, tech enthusiasts and professionals should be excited to see how these technologies will eventually enter the mainstream.

 

[dazzleworth]

The sound of backfiring....
Sounds pretty good

 

[bit_user]

tech enthusiasts and professionals should be excited to see how these technologies will eventually enter the mainstream.

Except, instead of giving us NVLink and InfinityFabric links, Nvidia and AMD have gone the opposite direction and removed SLI-like capabilities from consumer GPUs.
: (

Also, we no longer get consumer GPUs with HBM or fp64, now that they've both forked their GPU architectures into separate HPC/AI and consumer product lines.

Let's not even get started on networking. Supercomputers are using technologies like infiniband, but even 10 Gig Ethernet still isn't quite mainstream (finally getting there?).

HPC and datacenter tech is cool to read about, but it's becoming increasingly specialized and it feels like the trickle-down effect is breaking down. Even the recent server SSD form factors are desktop-unfriendly, like E1 and E3 families, which limits opportunities to snag some good ebay deals on used ones.

Pretty much the only area where I'm holding out hope for a datacenter technology to trickle down is CXL.

 

[COLGeek]

Except, instead of giving us NVLink and InfinityFabric links, Nvidia and AMD have gone the opposite direction and removed SLI-like capabilities from consumer GPUs.
: (

Also, we no longer get consumer GPUs with HBM or fp64, now that they've both forked their GPU architectures into separate HPC/AI and consumer product lines.

Let's not even get started on networking. Supercomputers are using technologies like infiniband, but even 10 Gig Ethernet still isn't quite mainstream (finally getting there?).

HPC and datacenter tech is cool to read about, but it's becoming increasingly specialized and it feels like the trickle-down effect is breaking down. Even the recent server SSD form factors are desktop-unfriendly, like E1 and E3 families, which limits opportunities to snag some good ebay deals on used ones.

Pretty much the only area where I'm holding out hope for a datacenter technology to trickle down is CXL.

SLI/Crossfire was a miss in the end and the market didn't really adopt it, else it would have continued to evolve.

Not all tech will make it to the mainstream, as you pointed it out. Nor should it for most users. The need simply isn't there or it isn't financially suitable for a consumer market.

 

[bit_user]

SLI/Crossfire was a miss in the end and the market didn't really adopt it, else it would have continued to evolve.

Not all tech will make it to the mainstream, as you pointed it out. Nor should it for most users. The need simply isn't there or it isn't financially suitable for a consumer market.

Yes, I agree with you on most points.

IMO, the main exceptions are:

• Datacenter SSDs - last year, I got a sweet deal on a new Intel/Solidigm U.2 2.5" SSD, which is a great form factor because they run hot and drive cages tend to be well-ventilated. Because the bottom had fallen out of the SSD market, I got that new 4 TB PCIe 4.0 drive for about $300 from an authorized dealer with 5-year warranty!
• GPUs with good fp64 performance. The 5-year-old, $700 Radeon VII had almost 2x the fp64 TFLOPS and about the same memory bandwidth as both the RX 7900XTX and RTX 4090! I know of some people who actually made use of it and are quite disappointed not to have anything comparable among newer consumer GPUs.

As for the rest, we're pretty much talking about a niche within a niche who'd have any real sort of home use for them. I'm not too worried about them.

 

[jp7189]

Except, instead of giving us NVLink and InfinityFabric links, Nvidia and AMD have gone the opposite direction and removed SLI-like capabilities from consumer GPUs.
: (

Also, we no longer get consumer GPUs with HBM or fp64, now that they've both forked their GPU architectures into separate HPC/AI and consumer product lines.

Let's not even get started on networking. Supercomputers are using technologies like infiniband, but even 10 Gig Ethernet still isn't quite mainstream (finally getting there?).

HPC and datacenter tech is cool to read about, but it's becoming increasingly specialized and it feels like the trickle-down effect is breaking down. Even the recent server SSD form factors are desktop-unfriendly, like E1 and E3 families, which limits opportunities to snag some good ebay deals on used ones.

Pretty much the only area where I'm holding out hope for a datacenter technology to trickle down is CXL.

I agree with you, and yet it seems to me fullsize desktop PCs are becoming niche. Following the pandemic, businesses went laptop to support work from home where they previously might have used desktops. Even most desktops are small form factors that are more akin to laptops without screens than they are to real desktops.