On 03/26/2014 05:28 PM, Jason Riedy wrote:
And Prentice Bisbal writes:
I haven't read the article in it's entirety, but it looks like
NVidia and IBM have just fired the first shot in Exascale race
(apologies for the mixed metaphors).
More another shot towards fragmentation. PCIe is something that
(more or less) everyone can implement. Not much margin. Special
interconnects (on board or between boards) are an open game.
There are related announcements from Intel. I'm kinda shocked
(well, no, but I wish I were) at the lack of such an announcement
from AMD.
In the rarefied market that is the race to Exascale, I don't think
fragmentation is a big concern. It's not mentioned in the article, but I
don't think this technology is going to be included in mainstream or
commodity systems. I think this is the first step towards whatever IBM
product is going to replace the Blue Gene, and in in that space
fragmentation isn't really a concern.
This partnership makes total sense. Until the GPUs came onto the scene,
IBM was pretty much unchallenged in the FLOPS/W game. Then GPUs came
along and presented the first real challenge (SiCortex went under before
it could be a contender). The BG/Q dominated the Green500 in June of
2012, but then in November 2012 Green500 list came out and the BG/Q was
knocked back to 5th place by 4 GPU systems (3 with Nvidia Teslas, one
with AMD FirePro). The current list is dominated by systems with Tesla
K20 GPUs. In these systems, I'm sure that the Xeon processors are
putting a noticeable dent in the FLOP/W score and is a hindrance on the
march to Exascale.
How do you fix this? You replace the Xeons with low power CPUS,
something IBM has been very successful with with the Blue Gene systems.
Or, depending on your point of view, you add GPUs to your Blue Gene.
Adding NVLink will increase performance that much more. What would be
interesting is if IBM could replace the existing proprietary network in
the BG/Q with NVlink for internode communication, too. Probably doesn't
scale beyond a few processors, but it's a thought.
--
Prentice
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