• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.

Our Visit to the Hunter Super Computer

W1zzard

W1zzard

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
May 14, 2004
Messages
28,985 (3.75/day)
System Specs
Processor Ryzen 7 5700X
Memory 48 GB
Video Card(s) RTX 4080
Storage 2x HDD RAID 1, 3x M.2 NVMe
Display(s) 30" 2560x1600 + 19" 1280x1024
Software Windows 10 64-bit
At HLRS in Stuttgart, Germany, we got an inside look at the "Hunter" supercomputer—an advanced system built on AMD EPYC processors and Instinct MI300A APUs. Join us as we share the insights gained during our visit.

Show full review
 
Super cool!!! The can in run Crysis made me chuckle.
 
This is amazing! It's not every day that we get to see what's inside the blades and make supercomputers tick, and insights on how this compute power is managed. I also found the little monitoring tablet pointing out the 37 kW of cooling capacity positively nuts!

I've been thinking of this for some time, the RTX 5090 many of us have on our common desktop PCs today is substantially faster than the world's fastest supercomputer was when TPU first came online (the first position in the November 2004 TOP500 was a 16-rack IBM Blue Gene/L system with ~70 TFLOPS of computing power). Tech sure has come far since then! :)
 
This is awesome, going to show this to my Dad, he was stationed at Stuttgart during the Vietnam War.
 
It's hard for me to mentally capture the increase in scale from my desktop PC to this impressive cluster. But it breaks my brain when I realize that there's an even greater difference in scale from this cluster to a private datacenter for frontier AI models.

cluster-manager_small.jpg

Imagine the challenge to build and run a system where each one of these nodes is an entire Hunter!
 
Dr. Dro said:
This is amazing! It's not every day that we get to see what's inside the blades and make supercomputers tick, and insights on how this compute power is managed. I also found the little monitoring tablet pointing out the 37 kW of cooling capacity positively nuts!

I've been thinking of this for some time, the RTX 5090 many of us have on our common desktop PCs today is substantially faster than the world's fastest supercomputer was when TPU first came online (the first position in the November 2004 TOP500 was a 16-rack IBM Blue Gene/L system with ~70 TFLOPS of computing power). Tech sure has come far since then! :)
Click to expand...
That's 70 TFLOPs in FP64, while the 5090 offers only an anemic 1.6 TFLOPs in FP64. Vega 20 (Radeon VII) was the last consumer GPU with decent FP64 performance.
 
Denver said:
That's 70 TFLOPs in FP64, while the 5090 offers only an anemic 1.6 TFLOPs in FP64. Vega 20 (Radeon VII) was the last consumer GPU with decent FP64 performance.
Click to expand...

I just researched, and apparently Linpack in the context of CPUs is indeed FP64. Then I stand corrected - it's amazing nonetheless. Just don't tell anyone ye olde GK110 Kepler Titan beats the 5090 there :pimp:
 
We briefly talked about the smaller, but faster, instructions at event. this also helps a lot with power. many hpc applications still rely on fp64, which makes them very hard to run on gpus, but the researchers are quite reluctant to work with lower precision (and do additional research where it matters for their results and where it doesnt). quantum simulations even want fp128
 
Socket AM5 MI300A when...? :D
 
W1zzard said:
There definitely is, you just need to convince AMD to build it for you :)
Click to expand...
It's like "Field of Dreams": "Build it ...and they will come." :)
 
The first thing I thought was instantly that it would be dope to see Cinebench running on that.
 
I dig TPU for this kind of stuff. Thanks, W1zzard!
 
Datacenters are going up all over the place in my metro. Meta and Google are the latest to build multi-MW AI server farms. You can recognize these buildings by their bunker-style warehouse construction, where they have cameras on the roof about every 50 feet, there are lots of cooling towers tucked away on one side, and there's a rather insurmountable fence surrounding the entire compound. I've heard that if you end up on the inside of that fence uninvited, you will be quickly greeted by a real security team, as opposed to your stereotypical mall-cop. They don't mess around, for good reason.
 
A very interesting read! Went to university in Stuttgart, met my first long term girlfriend there. Now it's about 20 years later and we're still close friends. Been talking a lot to my professor at the Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems. Good memories.

Great to see how efficiency has improved. I've just watched the Asianometry video essay on super computer cooling this afternoon, very fitting.
 
What's it hunting?
 
@W1zzard

Page 2: "is extremely useful to handle the dense packaging and thermal output of modern the system, "

That looks garbled.

So, in summary this computer is:

- not able to run CUDA
- GPU performance is that of an APU
- a bunch of closed-source tools as the only means to gather required performance data
- not able to cool itself at full load
- thermal throttling and forced migration of workloads due to thermal reasons without application control
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top