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Supercomputing Hardware

Europe's First Exascale Supercomputer Will Run On ARM Instead of X86 (extremetech.com) 40

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: One of the world's most powerful supercomputers will soon be online in Europe, but it's not just the raw speed that will make the Jupiter supercomputer special. Unlike most of the Top 500 list, the exascale Jupiter system will rely on ARM cores instead of x86 parts. Intel and AMD might be disappointed, but Nvidia will get a piece of the Jupiter action. [...] Jupiter is a project of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which is working with computing firms Eviden and ParTec to assemble the machine. Europe's first exascale computer will be installed at the Julich Supercomputing Centre in Munich, and assembly could start as soon as early 2024.

EuroHPC has opted to go with SiPearl's Rhea processor, which is based on ARM architecture. Most of the top 10 supercomputers in the world are running x86 chips, and only one is running on ARM. While ARM designs were initially popular in mobile devices, the compact, efficient cores have found use in more powerful systems. Apple has recently finished moving all its desktop and laptop computers to the ARM platform, and Qualcomm has new desktop-class chips on its roadmap. Rhea is based on ARM's Neoverse V1 CPU design, which was developed specifically for high-performance computing (HPC) applications with 72 cores. It supports HBM2e high-bandwidth memory, as well as DDR5, and the cache tops out at an impressive 160MB.
The report says the Jupiter system "will have Nvidia's Booster Module, which includes GPUs and Mellanox ultra-high bandwidth interconnects," and will likely include the current-gen H100 chips. "When complete, Jupiter will be near the very top of the supercomputer list."
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Europe's First Exascale Supercomputer Will Run On ARM Instead of X86

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  • by myowntrueself ( 607117 ) on Monday October 09, 2023 @06:22PM (#63913449)

    So, how many Raspberry Pi 4's would that be equivalent to?

  • Jülich Indeed has a superconputing center.

    Munich probably has several, public and private business owned (one is named after the mathematician Leibnitz and is run by TUM, a university)

    So which ohne is it?

  • LinPACK is running on the GPUs ... CPUs are just there for the shittier programmers, who will only get a tiny fraction of the peak FLOPS out of the system.

    • In peak parallel or supercomputing times, the x86 families were ok, but not great. These were the wannabe CPUs. Times have moved on, but it seems the reason people use Intel x86/64 compatible chips for supercomputers is because that's all anyone knows anymore. Monoculture madness. The modern chips have problems in super computers: the CPU in your PC is actually a big stack of chips with multiple layers, there's a lot there that gets in the way of performance and it's there for compatibility, etc. Eve

    • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      Right remind me how much RAM there is on the best GPU's? Some problems just don't work well or even at all on GPU's because they have limitations that CPU's don't. If you actually worked in HPC you would know that and not make assine comments.

  • I wonder when RISC-V will be used in supercomputers. I know that there are a lot of new SBCs coming out with this CPU architecture, and even with backlevel Linux kernels and marginal software, they are showing leaps and bounds when it comes to performance.

    • I wonder when RISC-V will be used in supercomputers.

      When it becomes better performance-per-watt than the competition.

    • by cats-paw ( 34890 )

      I was wondering the same thing.

      There are more than enough of these supercomputers to drive demand for a common processor that's geared especially for supercomputer applications.

      It seems like it would be worth the effort.

      Doesn't necessarily even need to be a RISC-V , a more specialized design focused on massively parallel operation seem like it could be a win.

      or not, maybe there's just not that much performance to be gained.

      still it would be worthwhile to create a RISC-V with a few features that would make s

    • by Misagon ( 1135 )

      Right now, supercomputers are made of GPUs. The CPUs are there mostly to control them.
      GPUs are used because they are massively parallel, operating on the SIMT [wikipedia.org] model.

      There already exist RISC-V CPUs with vector units as wide as the SIMD units on ARM and x86.
      However, RISC-V's vector extension was designed to be scalable from the start, allowing the same code to run also on very wide vector units.
      There has been talks about building GPUs based on RISC-V CPUs with vector units, as they are also capable of runnin

  • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Monday October 09, 2023 @08:02PM (#63913671)

    Or are the ARM cores just there to feed the GPUs?

    • In the world of supercomputers everything matters. The GPUs, the interface to the CPU, the memory, the network. Pretending any one part is irrelevant because the GPU does the work is a good way of massively limiting your compute potential.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • In the world of supercomputers everything matters. The GPUs, the interface to the CPU, the memory, the network.

        Pretending any one part is irrelevant because the GPU does the work is a good way of massively limiting your compute potential.

        When I said "Does it compute? Or are the ARM cores just there to feed the GPUs?" this is not speaking to relevance, drawing conclusions, making assertions or judgements.

        It is a question about the typical expected role of these processors in this system. The article does not say.

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday October 09, 2023 @08:42PM (#63913765)

    Europe's First Exascale Supercomputer Will Run On ARM

    It will also run OpenWRT and the site will have *really* good WiFi. :-)

  • France! Finally, Europeans buy European.

  • by KlomDark ( 6370 )
    Uh huhuh I hate when I get the 'rhea

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