HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING


“Whether it was in technical sessions or on the exhibit floor, SC18 inspired people with the best in research, technology, and information sharing”


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processors have on HPC workloads,’ said Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer, AMD. ‘As the HPC industry approaches exascale systems, we’re at the beginning of a new era of heterogeneous computer that requires a combination of CPU, GPU and software that only AMD can deliver. We’re excited to have fantastic customers leading the charge with our Radeon Instinct accelerators, AMD EPYC processors and the ROCm open software platform. Cray announced a new computing


platform called Shasta which is set to replace its XC50 systems. Shasta is an entirely new design aimed at exascale performance, data-centric workloads, and increased competition of processor architectures. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) announced just ahead of SC18 that it has chosen a Cray ‘Shasta’ supercomputer for its NERSC-9 system, named ‘Perlmutter,’ in 2020. The program contract is valued at $146 million, one of the largest in Cray’s history, and will feature a 32-cabinet Shasta system. Cray seems to acknowledge the shifting demands of HPC applications as the new system is positioned to take advantage of the growing trend for a single system to handle converged modelling, simulation, AI, and analytics workloads. The system


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allows users to mix and match processor architectures in the same system (X86, ARM, GPUs), as well as choose system interconnects from Cray (Slingshot), Intel (Omni-Path) or Mellanox (Infiniband). ‘Our scientists gather massive amounts of data from scientific instruments like telescopes and detectors that our supercomputers analyse every day,’ said Dr Sudip Dosanjh, director of the NERSC Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. ‘The Shasta system’s ease of use and adaptability to modern workflows and applications will allow us to broaden access to supercomputing and enable a whole new pool of users. The ability to bring this data into the supercomputer will allow us to quickly and efficiently scale and reduce overall time to discovery.’ ‘Cray is widely seen as one of only a few


HPC vendors worldwide that is capable of aggressive technology innovation at the system architecture level,’ said Steve Conway, Hyperion Research senior vice president of research. ‘Cray’s Shasta architecture closely matches the wish list that leading HPC users have for the exascale era, but didn’t expect to be available this soon. This is truly a breakthrough achievement.’


Top500 shows US gathering pace The newest release of the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers also


took place at SC. While the DOS system Summit system from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was still first place there was significant movement in the top ten places. The US DOE system, Sierra, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) took second place however the overall list showed that China is still edging out the US in the total number of systems that made the list. Summit widened its lead as the number one system, improving its High Performance Linpack (HPL) performance from 122.3 to 143.5 Pflops since its debut in June 2018. Sierra also added to its HPL results from the previous list. The system increased its score from 71.6 to 94.6 Pflops, enough to take the number two position. Both are IBM-built supercomputers, powered by Power9 CPUs and Nvidia V100 GPUs. Sierra’s ascendance pushed China’s


Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, into third place. Prior to last June, it had held the top position on the Top500 list for two years with its HPL performance of 93.0 petaflops. TaihuLight was developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC). The share of Top500 installations in China continues to rise, with the country now claiming 227 systems (45 per cent of the total). The number of supercomputers that call the US home continues to decline, reaching an all-time low of 109 (22 per cent of the total). However, systems in the US are, on average, more powerful, resulting in an aggregate system performance of 38 per cent, compared to 31 per cent for China.


December 2018/Janaury 2019 Scientific Computing World 9


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