Super Computers and Moore's Law - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: raptor1956
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 03, 2018, 01:04:58 am
content: There are bragging rights that go along with it but there's also legitimate need for super-computers and while Moore's Law has largely died the rate of increase for super-computer power is pretty remarkable. Since 1993 the power of the most powerful computer has increased by a factor of a million while Moore's Law would have anticipated, perhaps, 50,000 if we were being generous to that now dead trend. Of course, the power per watt or power per CPU hasn't increased nearly that fast so the Moore's Law metric is not truly applicable, but still, the power has increased by over a million times in 25ish years.It is interesting to note that China is far and away the leader here with about twice as many computers in the top 500 as the second place USA does though the USA does, apparently, have the two top computers at the moment. The next step is exascale computers and by some estimates that will be the point where computers equal the human brain in neural power -- whatever that really means. Certainly for many things your smartphone is way ahead of the human brain.So, the question is ... how much further can we go with super-computers before the bottleneck of current silicon technology ends the practical increases? Back in the 50's and 60's is was not uncommon for computers to be the size or a large room or gymnasium so in a way super-computers are returning to the massive size of those early computers. While modern super-computers are getting bigger as they increase the node count there has to be a practical limit on how big that gets and I'd guess we're getting fairly close to that point.Brian

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 03, 2018, 01:57:14 am
content: Quote from: raptor1956 on December 03, 2018, 01:04:58 amDon't be too literal with the definition of Moore's Law. Certainly, in its day, the original definition made sense and served honorably for many years as a reference point for technological advancement. However, it has already been tweaked to serve as an improved measuring stick - so I'm open to the concept of Moore's Law being adapted to suit the technological paradigm we find ourselves with today.

author: Tom45
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 03, 2018, 04:37:22 am
content: Moore's "Law" is about the number of transistors on a chip, not about computer power.Individual cpus and gpus are getting faster due to Moore's "Law" advances, but also to advances in architecture and clock speed.But the major advances in Top500 systems involve exploiting packaging and chip to chip communication advances to build systems with more processors (cpu and gpu based) being tied together in useful ways.

author: Wan Huang Luo
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 04, 2018, 07:08:39 pm
content: Manycore processors (many cores on the same die) helped supercomputers scale up in performance at a rate higher than that prescribed by Moore's Law.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 04, 2018, 08:11:24 pm
content: The real question is what are people doing with these things that makes it worthwhile to spend the money to develop and build them. AFAIK in the US there are two big things - simulation of nuclear weapons and weather prediction, and a handful of other applications such as petroleum geology. I have no idea what drives it worldwide, though weather simulation is bound to be one of them.What makes a cosmologist, for example, decide to spend money on a big computer instead of a big telescope?

author: Mattjd
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 04, 2018, 09:27:31 pm
content: Big data is the reason, and the rise of deep learning. Amazon aws services have a mega butt load of cpu and GPU farms. As does Google

author: jmelson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 04, 2018, 09:39:34 pm
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on December 04, 2018, 08:11:24 pmWell, there is also computational fluid dynamics - not only modeling flying aircraft, but cooling airflow through electronic equipment and water through pumps and valves. Then, there's finite element analysis of mechanical structures (anything from trains and ships to buildings). Marry these two and you have aeroelastic simulation, where aerodynamic forces alter the shape of an airframe, and the altered shape changes the aerodynamics.There's also electrical circuit simulation, where the behavior of ICs are modeled. And, as you mention, simulation of stars and galaxies.Jon

author: raptor1956
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 04, 2018, 10:26:22 pm
content: Yeah, a whole host of simulations with super fine granularity in fields like medicine, aerospace, chemistry, environment and weather, nuclear dynamics, and a near infinite number of other things are driving super computers. I suspect the race for ever more powerful super computers will slow unless we have breakthroughs in the fundamental transistor technology that will permit significantly greater density and/or switching speed. The recent trend has been to build bigger system with more nodes but I think we're getting close to a practical limit in how far we can go in that direction. Again, as with other computing systems, we are at or near a bottleneck in performance and until the density and/or speed can be increased and increased substantially I think the race is going to slow to a stop within 5 years.One avenue of increase is interconnect speed but that only gets you so far.Brian

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 01:06:51 am
content: Simulations, sure. But which one's need world class (or faster) speed enough to pay the bill? Big Data maybe, but those big compute farms aren't petaflop computers. And mostly don't need to be. CFD has to compete with real wind tunnels unless you are doing hypersonics which is mostly weapon related.It sure isn't Spice or the like.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 01:13:49 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on December 04, 2018, 08:11:24 pm"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943As has been the case, having the ability has provided the environment to innovate and find new areas of application. We are now doing things with computers that were never imagined a few years ago - and therewillbe things we will be doing with computers that we have not yet imagined.We are already exploring areas such as:Quote from: raptor1956 on December 04, 2018, 10:26:22 pm... who knows where we will be in another 50 years ... or 20 ... or 10!

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 01:27:43 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on December 05, 2018, 01:06:51 amClimate modelling for starters. The finer you can define your atmospheric granules, the closer you will get to accurate modelling. Getting down to 1 cubic metre is an achievement - but even in that space there can be significant variations. Defining a smaller volume in itself is not a problem - but the resultant calculations are going to take an inordinate amount of time,unlessyou have mega grunt behind it.Same goes for pharmaceutical and biological interactions. Start off with a basic model and fine tune it to match observed reactions. Prove the model against some benchmarks and then start trialling new drugs - in simulation. If each simulation takes a month, then progress is going to be painfully slow - but if it takes an hour, expect great strides.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 01:28:33 am
content: ..... then there are the Gamers.

author: raptor1956
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 01:51:35 am
content: Quote from: Brumby on December 05, 2018, 01:28:33 amOK, that made me laugh...Perhaps Summit or Sierra will finally allow true 4K gaming at full detail!Brian

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 02:01:30 am
content: Lots of computing applications now have the smarts to understand almost as many inputs as people do in similar ways and for similar reasons. Computers increasingly can look at things the same ways we do and output meaningful descriptions of them and even make guesses about why we do the things we do with them, the more data they can process like this (while watching an expert person decide what happens) the more accurate they get to predicting what the expert person will do, and once they get to getting it right 90% of the time then they start actually doing it and that remaining 10% is all that gets handled by people. Thats about where we are now in lots of areas. See where this is going!Lots of leisure time for everybody.That is the real killer app. How will we handle the full range of tasks like designing power supplies or battleships or holiday cottages?Look at how games handle procedural generation now, using genetic algorithms. This is already being used in architecture to allow big architectural firms to realize huge economies of scale literally churning out new versions of existing plans with needed modifications within a minute or two. These buildings are as good as any others. They simply have gotten the process down to a science. And it keeps getting better.Look at how people can interact in virtual reality. people will sketch things out and see what they will look like make some changes and all the changes will be rendered to their VR world in real time.This will make all these kinds of tasks go very quickly.Just like with electronics, where PCB software can churn out all the various documents needed to have it manufactured, building a newly created building will also be accelerated by newly streamlined processes, for example, a building might be assembled by an endless stream of quadcopters using parts that automatically attach themselves to one another when placed close enough.The copters will be guided by RTK GPS to within one centimeter of where they are supposed to be, building materials delivered by waves of autonomous vehicles in exactly the right order. It will only take a few days to build a building that would have taken a full year a few decades ago. And most of that time will likely be doing things like waiting for concrete pours to set.Basically we're seeing a global revolution of technologically enabled saving of labor. All of these technologies build on one another, and keep getting better and better.People shouldn't sit idly by and become passive observers of life, what we need to do is absorb all this data as early as we can so we can build on it to learn more data and ways of doing things and living our lives. Every person can be much more than what we're told we can be. We all decide our planets future, not just the self chosen few..A better world is possible.

author: Mattjd
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 03:51:05 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on December 05, 2018, 01:06:51 amMm, I think you're underestimating the requirement for big data, and yes Amazon AWS is on the petaflop range.https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/18-hours-33k-and-156314-cores-amazon-cloud-hpc-hits-a-petaflop/Man, in deep learning, say you are doing rgb photos, and say they're from 3d mri scans. Its a fucking insane amount of data. I group of costudents in the deep learning research group I am part of at school was doing some image based classification using deep learning. I forget the exact classification was, but point is, they have like 16 TB of 3d MRI scans, ands its only like 1000 people total or so I think. They had to drop their training to 1 image per batch to be able to run the shit on their local computer. Its a job for a HPC.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 06:53:16 am
content: I don't question that there are lots of ways to consume flops. In enormous quantities. The question is which of those uses will foot the bill. Kind of like 8 digit voltmeters. You can dream up many uses for them. But how many people lay out the $5-10 grand to own one.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 07:01:23 am
content: .... enough for more than one manufacturer to produce them.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 02:05:21 pm
content: Quote from: Tom45 on December 03, 2018, 04:37:22 amMoore's Law is about the decreasing cost per transistor whether this is produced by greater density, larger chips, better packaging, or higher yields.QuoteNote that Moore's Law has nothing to do with transistor performance. Decreasing cost per transistor has often come at the expense of performance compared to the previous generation.Usually what matters now however is power dissipation per area which has become the primary limitation in clock speed.QuoteExactly although interconnection bandwidth and latency has often been what limits supercomputer performance.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 03:02:00 pm
content: As I understand it some of the most interesting kinds of computing now is being done with floating point math where lower precision works almost as well as high (and can be much faster) so if your hardware gives you a doubling of speed when you use half the precision that helps a LOT.Quote from: CatalinaWOW on December 05, 2018, 06:53:16 am

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 03:16:44 pm
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on December 05, 2018, 01:06:51 amNo it does not. Wind tunnel is for verifying that your design works properly after it already was simulated on computer. If you physically build a model, verify it in wind tunnel, then rebuild it again, you either live 40 years ago or are idiot.Also good luck watching what happens within an engine with a help of wind tunnel.https://youtu.be/txk-VO1hzBY