Comments on: June 2023 Top500 Grasping with Relevance at ISC 2023

By: Jim Z

Jim Z — Tue, 30 May 2023 06:54:46 +0000

The bigger death kneel for Top500 is that it doesn’t count the dozens of exascale AI training systems at hyperscalers as “real” supercomputers since they don’t run fp64. It used to be that the hardest problems that had the most compute thrown at it were all double precision, but the elephant in the room is that 16 bit training workloads have usurped fp64 as top dog, and this happened years ago.

By: Eric Olson

Eric Olson — Tue, 30 May 2023 02:27:01 +0000

In reply to “Are there that many systems doing classical FP64 HPC anymore?”

There are thousands of such systems. Some have been bumped off the list by general cloud infrastructure and a certain vendor’s advertising gimmicks. Others never ran the HPL benchmark, possibly because it is irrelevant and there are real scientific computing workloads more important to optimize for performance. For example, this may be why recent Chinese exascale systems were never submitted to the list.

Advances in AI have also lead to increases in HPC because traditional HPC is often the cheapest or only way to create the training data.

By: Kareem U

Kareem U — Mon, 29 May 2023 23:27:51 +0000

They’ve got to clean this up. I can’t believe they even allowed 19 same customer and site Lenovo systems. They’re also allowing all of these Lenovo systems to be anonymous. If you look at the data they’re not getting classified HPC systems on the list with that. They’ve just been getting these web hosting customer systems from Lenovo.

You’re right, they’ve had to choose having a good list and having a big list and they chose a big list.

By: uf

uf — Mon, 29 May 2023 19:35:00 +0000

Is there any point in keeping the list so long? Are there that many systems doing classical FP64 HPC anymore? I think it would be better to toss out the fake systems and list only the top 100 or so.

By: Eric Olson

Eric Olson — Mon, 29 May 2023 17:28:42 +0000

The lack of relevance of the HPL to problems of scientific interest has been pointed out by Jack Dongarra the creator of the benchmark for some time. The problem is that real HPC is memory, latency and bandwidth bound while the benchmark primarily reflects floating point performance.

The HPCG is more relevant and it’s interesting that in 2023 Fugaku is ahead of Frontier by 14 percent on that benchmark.

I agree benchmarks of cloud infrastructure not actually be used for scientific computing, while interesting as a point of comparison, do not belong on a list of the top 500 machines devoted to research and science. To keep the noise from drowning out the signal, I would suggest retaining 500 machines for which half the cycles are devoted to HPC. Those systems which don’t satisfy this requirement could appear as extra entries in order with footnotes on the list but not enumerated with an official ranking.

By: Geff

Geff — Mon, 29 May 2023 16:06:54 +0000

I appreciate that you don’t just recite the findings and have a unique perspective.

Why no vid on this?

Your youtube videos are so popular you’d reach more with this message.

If you want change you’ve gotta hit both audiences