Showing posts with label super. Show all posts
Showing posts with label super. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Microsoft Ends Moore's Law, Builds a Supercomputer in the Cloud


A group of Microsoft engineers have built an artificial intelligence technique called deep neural networks that will be deployed on Catapult by the end of 2016 to power Bing search results. They say that this AI supercomputer in the cloud will increase the speed and efficiency of Microsoft’s data centers and that their will be a noticeable difference obvious to Bing search engine users. They say that this is the "The slow but eventual end of Moore’s Law."
"Utilizing the FPGA chips, Microsoft engineering (Sitaram Lanka and Derek Chiou) teams can write their algorithms directly onto the hardware they are using, instead of using potentially less efficient software as the middle man," notes Microsoft blogger Allison Linn. "What’s more, an FPGA can be reprogrammed at a moment’s notice to respond to new advances in artificial intelligence or meet another type of unexpected need in a datacenter."
The team created this system that uses a reprogrammable computer chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA) that will significantly improve the speed of Bing and Azure queries. "This was a moonshot project that succeeded," said Lanka.
What they did was insert an FPGA directly between the network and the servers, which in bypassing the traditional software approach speeds up computation. “What we’ve done now is we’ve made the FPGA the front door,” said Derek Chiou, one of the Microsoft engineers who created the system. "“I think a lot of people don’t know what FPGAs are capable of."
Here is how the team described the technology:
The Cataputl Gen2 Card showing FPGA and Network ports enabling the Configurable Cloud
Hyperscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability).  In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications.  This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers.

We deployed this design over a production server bed, and show how it can be used for both service acceleration (Web search ranking) and network acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high speeds).
Hardware and Software compute planes in the Configurable Cloud


This architecture is much more scalable than prior work which used secondary rack-scale networks for inter-FPGA communication.  By coupling to the network plane, direct FPGA-to-FPGA messages can be achieved at comparable latency to previous work, without the secondary network.  Additionally, the scale of direct inter-FPGA messaging is much larger.  The average round-trip latencies observed in our measurements among 24, 1000, and 250,000 machines are under 3, 9, and 20 microseconds, respectively.   The Configurable Cloud architecture has been deployed at hyperscale in Microsoft’s production datacenters worldwide.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

China Made the World's Fastest & Powerful Super Computer without US chips



China beats its own record with the World's fastest supercomputer.


Sunway TaihuLight, a newly built supercomputer from China, now ranks as the world's most powerful machine.


During the International Supercomputer Conference in Germany on Monday, Top500 declared China's 10.65 Million-core Sunway TaihuLight as the world's fastest supercomputer. Moreover, the supercomputer is leading by a wide margin, too.


With 93 petaflops of processing power, Sunway TaihuLight is nearly three times more powerful than the world’s previous fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-2, which had been the world's fastest computer for last 3 years with speeds of 33.9 petaflops per second.



That's 93 quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOP), which means the supercomputer can perform around 93,000 trillion calculations per second, at its peak.


The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi.


"Sunway TaihuLight, with 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes," is one of the world's most efficient systems, with "peak power consumption under load (running the HPL benchmark)" at a relatively modest 15.37 Megawatts of energy consumption.



What's the irony?


The microprocessors inside Sunway TaihuLight are 100 percent Chinese.


Sunway TaihuLight is powered entirely by Chinese processors (the 260-core ShenWei 26010) and runs on a custom Linux-based operating system.

Speaking of the TOP500 list, the National Supercomputing Centre's director, Professor Dr. Guangwen Yang said:

"As the first number one system of China that is completely based on homegrown processors, the Sunway TaihuLight system demonstrates the significant progress that China has made in the domain of designing and manufacturing large-scale computation system."

In the past, China relied heavily on American processors for its supercomputers, but the US thought that China was using the Tianhe-2, which was built with Intel cores, to run its nuclear simulations.


Due to this reason, the United States government banned Intel from exporting its powerful Xeon processors over a year ago to a number of Chinese supercomputer makers.



China is Leading the World in Supercomputing


The US decision did not halt the Chinese progress. Instead, it seems like the US policy has made an opposite effect.


For the first time since the Top500 list began, China has overtaken the United States in the amount of supercomputers being used. China has 167 computers in the top 500 while the US has 165.


"Considering that just 10 years ago, China claimed a mere 28 systems on the list, with none ranked in the top 30, the nation has come further and faster than any other country in the history of supercomputing," said the latest Top500 announcement.

Sunway TaihuLight will be used in scientific research and engineering work in fields including life science research, data analytics, advanced manufacturing and climate, weather and Earth systems modeling.