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Supercomputing AMD

'El Capitan' Ranked Most Powerful Supercomputer In the World (engadget.com) 44

Posted by BeauHD from the breaking-the-barrier dept.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's "El Capitan" supercomputer is now ranked as the world's most powerful, exceeding a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) score of 1.742 exaflops on the latest Top500 list. Engadget reports: El Capitan is only the third "exascale" computer, meaning it can perform more than a quintillion calculations in a second. The other two, called Frontier and Aurora, claim the second and third place slots on the TOP500 now. Unsurprisingly, all of these massive machines live within government research facilities: El Capitan is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Frontier is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory claims Aurora. [Cray Computing] had a hand in all three systems.

El Capitan has more than 11 million combined CPU and GPU cores based on AMD 4th-gen EPYC processors. These 24-core processors are rated at 1.8GHz each and have AMD Instinct M1300A APUs. It's also relatively efficient, as such systems go, squeezing out an estimated 58.89 Gigaflops per watt. If you're wondering what El Capitan is built for, the answer is addressing nuclear stockpile safety, but it can also be used for nuclear counterterrorism.
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'El Capitan' Ranked Most Powerful Supercomputer In the World More

'El Capitan' Ranked Most Powerful Supercomputer In the World

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  • I missed the last Apple event. Apple loves comparing the specs for its latest hardware with that of the competition. What value did it quote for the M4 mini?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by printman ( 54032 )

      Not sure about M4/M4 Pro, but M4 Max's GPU is rated for 18.4Tflops at 62W, or just shy of 300Gflops per watt...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by godrik ( 1287354 )

        Note that this is not accurate.

        First, top500/green500 use measured performance, not peak performance. The measurement is made on Linpack. Typically even on single node system, you are rarely at more than 80% of peak performance.

        Also, top500 measures 64-bit floating point numbers, the 18Tflops of the M4 Max is for 32bit. So really you will lose half the performance at least, but typically you lose more than half.

        FInally, it is easy to have good power on a single node machine that is low memory. But they are

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by printman ( 54032 )

          ... so I was just providing info from Apple, not making a (ridiculous) statement that a single M4 Max will out-perform this new supercomputer.

          That said, even if we use a back-of-the-envelope "net" estimate of 75Gflops/W for the M4 Max (and that's just the GPU - the CPU and NPU cores would also contribute to the total), the 58.89Gflops/W efficiency of this new supercomputer can very likely be improved upon significantly.

  • Tesla claims 400 exaflops, soon to be 1200 exaflops (1.2 zettaflops) https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/04/tesla-has-400-exaflops-of-ai-training-compute.html [nextbigfuture.com].

    • The kessel run (Score:4, Funny)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Monday November 18, 2024 @09:43PM (#64956231)

      It does it in 8 parsnips

    • This is a leaderboard based on a specific benchmark, HPL (as mentioned in the summary). Taking the theoretical max of an H100 and multiplying it by how many you bought is a different thing.

    • Tesla claims 400 exaflops, soon to be 1200 exaflops (1.2 zettaflops) https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/04/tesla-has-400-exaflops-of-ai-training-compute.html [nextbigfuture.com].

      What's a flop? For HPL, we're talking about 64-bit floating point operations. For most AI, no one uses 64-bit, which means that we're not talking about the same types of flops. This is a huge difference because both calculation operations and data movement for 64 bits takes much more area and power. And if we start talking about inference, the data sizes get even smaller, and FP becomes integer.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ajedgar ( 67399 )

        Yes and... let's say Tesla's claim of 400 exaflops is the theoretical max and divide it by two to bring it closer to reality, and then divide it by 8 because we're going to use 8 CFloat8 numbers to do the equivalent of 1 64-bit flop, and then divide it by 2 again, just for good measure, what do we get? 12.5 exaflops or 7 times the capability of El Capitan.

        Their next iteration will be 3 times that. And they won't stop there.

  • Nuclear counterterrorism (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday November 18, 2024 @09:12PM (#64956173) Journal

    but it can also be used for nuclear counterterrorism.

    What does that mean?

    • Presumably that there is some paranoia that bad dudes will get their hands on nukes or , more likely, thermal 'dirty bomb' capacity (Ie a regular bomb that spreads nasty radioactive shit everywhere, ie a bomb packed with spent uranium shit)

      I'm not super convinced but the likelyhood of certain rogue states (Iran, NK) leveling up to nuke capable and then outfitting whacko groups with that capacity cant be entirely ruled out.

      • Presumably that there is some paranoia that bad dudes will get their hands on nukes or , more likely, thermal 'dirty bomb' capacity

        I'm sure you are right, there are crazy people who want to set of nuclear bombs in populated areas. I'm just not sure how a supercomputer helps with counterterrorism to stop that.

        • "Nuclear counterterrorism" was included in the budget request so Congress would approve it.

          Congress will often allocate funding for a specific purpose, so a budget request can be streamlined if written to fit that purpose.

          Are these computers actually being used for "nuclear counterterrorism"? Of course not.

          • Yeah, I'm trying to think of anything you'd do with a machine with this kind of simulation capability that would actually have nuclear counterterrorism value and I'm coming up pretty much blank.

            The only maybe I can come up with is, a system in this class is capable of full-physics entire-lifetime simulations of a nuclear power plant and all the different accidents that can happen to it, so I... guess it might conceivably be used to examine terrorist attack scenarios and preempt them or engineer to defeat

        • My guess is that its more about preparedness. Lets. take the more likely scenario of a terrorist sets off a dirty bomb down town, that blasts a tonne of spent uranium dust into the air. Well, you'd want to have some idea how that kind of explosion would play out and thatss going to take a lot of very expensive fluid dynamic modelling.

          Knowing how this plays out will go very far in making sure Emergency services know how to deal with this scenario, and thats a difference that could save potentially tens to hu

        • Zoom. Rotate. Enhance...

      • Presumably that there is some paranoia that bad dudes will get their hands on nukes or , more likely, thermal 'dirty bomb' capacity (Ie a regular bomb that spreads nasty radioactive shit everywhere, ie a bomb packed with spent uranium shit)

        These government supercomputers do many things, including stimulating nuclear reactions. The key motivation is using the simulation to avoid real test explosions. This is needed not only to develop new and better weapons but also to understand how current weapons deteriorate.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cstacy ( 534252 )

      but it can also be used for nuclear counterterrorism.

      What does that mean?

      Simulation of the latest nuclear bombs we are designing, in lieu of actual real-world testing that prematurely reveals what we are up to.

      All that kind of stuff is done under the Department Of Energy (DOE). That they can use those same supercomputers for weather or biology or even other nuclear physics modelling (e.g. fusion reactors) is just a side benefit. The real reason for all this computing power has always been for bomb design/simulations.

      • Simulation of the latest nuclear bombs we are designing, in lieu of actual real-world testing that prematurely reveals what we are up to.

        What does that have to do with counterterrorism? Are we testing teeny tiny little nukes that fit into pagers?

  • Beowulf (Score:2, Funny)

    by io333 ( 574963 )

    something

  • ... Linux^H^H^H^H^HEl Capitan [wikipedia.org]?

  • I have to think this thing would have a fighting chance of running Flight Simulator 2024 with all the bells and whistles turned to max.

  • Mac Mini (Score:5, Funny)

    by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @12:16AM (#64956365)

    This is fantastic news, as I am unable to upgrade my 2009 Mac Mini beyond El Capitan! I never even realized it was a supercomputer!

    I understand that Apple wants me to buy a new supercomputer, but why Homebrew totally dropped it is a mystery....

    • Apple hasn't made a supercomputer since the PowerMac G4 [youtube.com]...

      • Apple made quite a lot of Super Computers in various US universities.
        I think they indeed were G4 based.

        So your "joke" backfired.

        • Did you actually watch the video? The joke did not backfire you just weren't in on it.

          I saw that commercial when it originally aired, and even then it was eye-roll worthy.

          -Why so serious? Life is collection of comedies.

          • Well, it did not see as if it was about a super computer, but a single G4 desktop ...

          • Well, the story behind the ad was that the PowerMac G4 was considered a "Supercomputer" by the US Department of Commerce because it could deliver more than 1 GFLOP. Of course, the definition was changed shortly before the PowerMac G4 shipped.

    • Although 10.11 El Capitan has long been dropped from official support, Homebrew does still work on it! Can't say the same for most of today's formulae, though

  • The most powerful known supercomputer (Score:3)

    by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @05:00AM (#64956635)
    Every time I hear this claim I often wonder about the systems out there that are not acknowledged...
  • Let's play '"World Dominion" !!!

    • Let's play '"World Dominion" !!!

      Wouldn't you rather play a nice game of chess? Or Global Thermonuclear War?

  • Wow ...

    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these ...

    [Long time Slashdotters will know what I mean]

  • Can it play DOOM? World of Warcraft?

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