[HN Gopher] The Frontier computer, which broke the exascale barr...
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       The Frontier computer, which broke the exascale barrier in 2022
        
       Author : DamnInteresting
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2023-01-05 21:46 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
        
       | LadyCailin wrote:
       | What kinds of problems is this used to solve? Is it a different
       | class of problems that couldn't be solved with an equivalent
       | number of commodity servers?
        
         | foota wrote:
         | Generally, supercomputers are used in problems where you need
         | fast access to all or lots of a large dataset. I think a common
         | example is weather simulation, where each grid cell needs to
         | update based on its neighbors at each timestep.
        
         | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
         | I expect you _could_ solve the same problems on commodity
         | hardware, but it 'd be slower and/or more expensive.
        
         | reportingsjr wrote:
         | Most of the top supercomputers are used to model nuclear
         | weapons, weather and climate, and various sciencey things.
         | 
         | I don't know if the top ones are still used for oil and gas
         | exploration (crunching data to provide higher resolution and
         | higher accuracy oil field maps), but they have been in the
         | past.
        
         | green-salt wrote:
         | The primary ones I worked with were for working on atmospheric
         | science:
         | 
         | https://www2.cisl.ucar.edu/about
         | https://www2.cisl.ucar.edu/ncar-supercomputing-history/bluef...
        
       | green-salt wrote:
       | I worked with a Cray back in 2012 and the amount of engineering
       | that goes into each rack and down to each blade is incredible.
       | The biggest thing that got me was the geometry of the heatsinks
       | that were designed to slightly compress air as it left each blade
       | into the one above it.
        
       | nsxwolf wrote:
       | ~9 million Zen 3 cores is a lot of cores. The TOP500 site says it
       | uses 21,100 kilowatts of power.
        
         | luhn wrote:
         | It's only 600k Zen 3 cores. Still a massive number.
         | 
         | > Frontier uses 9,472 AMD Epyc 7A53s "Trento" 64 core 2 GHz
         | CPUs (606,208 cores) and 37,888 Radeon Instinct MI250X GPUs
         | (8,335,360 cores).
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-06 23:00 UTC)