Comments on: TACC Fires Up “Vista” Bridge To Future “Horizon” Supercomputer

By: Calamity Jim

Calamity Jim — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 11:37:36 +0000

I reckon everything WAS bigger in Texas BEFORE, like in 2019, when Frontera’s 39 PetaFlops looked like this “view between two rows of Frontera servers in the TACC data center” ( https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2019/06/17/frontera-named-5th-fastest-supercomputer-world/ ) … today’s 40 PetaFlop Vista is just microscopic by comparison (what, 7 cabinets on the TNP photo!?). Before you know it we’ll be putting those in our backpockets (they’re still bigger in Texas)!

By: Eric Olson

Eric Olson — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 01:25:19 +0000

My understanding is academic computing clusters consisting of a combination of GPU and CPU-only nodes have been around since the first Tesla GPUs came out. For example, Big Red 2 at Indiana University (ranked 47 in the Top500 from 2013) consisted of a combination of Cray XK7 GPU nodes and XE6 CPU nodes. At a smaller scale the clusters here (never made the Top500) have been hybrid GPU and CPU-only nodes for a couple generations.

My impression is there are almost no examples of parallel codes that efficiently use both GPU and CPU-only nodes in parallel. Could the main advantage be a single team doing the maintenance or a single filesystem shared between the two different kinds of nodes?

By: HuMo

HuMo — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 20:56:46 +0000

At 16,000 feet, the Alps’ Mont Blanc will remain I’m sure roughly twice as high as Texas’ 8,800 feet Guadalupe Peak, and 20 times Austin’s Bonnell Mountain. But, yes, who could blame TACC’s Stanzione for seeking to build new Horizons that can indeed elevate Austin TX from its Faulty Balconies (or is it Balcones Fault? And if not, whose fault is it?) and into the stratospheric heights of the Venado (13,000 ft, 130 PF/s peak), and Alps (16,000 ft, 353 PF/s peak) of this world!

The most important question to be answered at this time, by this newly installed Vista onto the vertiginous 388 PF/s peak Horizon of upcoming high performance computational oomph, is clearly not “what can those redlegged, bigheaded, high plains gracehoppers do for you?”, nor is it, interestingly enough, “what can you do for those redlegged, bigheaded, high plains gracehoppers?” (obviously), but rather: which local specialty of food is it that must be associated with this here newfangled machinery? It’s swiss cheese for the Alps, and blue corn tortillas for the Venado, but what of the Horizon? “Inquisition minds” … 8^b