The demand for computational speed

The demand for computational speed

What is computational speed?

How do we measure speed in computation?
  • Floating-Point Operation per Second (FLOPS)
    • Count number of floating-point calculations (arithmetic operations) per second.
  • Not MIPS (millions of instructions per second) as MIPS also count non-arithmetic operations such as data movement or condition.

$FLOPS = sockets \times \frac{cores}{socket} \times \frac{cycles}{second} \times \frac{FLOPS}{cycle}$

  • MFLOPS (megaFLOPS) = 1,000,000 FLOPS
  • GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS) = 1,000,000,000 FLOPS
Modern measurement of speed
  • TFLOPS (teraFLOPS) = 1,000,000,000,000 FLOPS
    • Intel’s ASCI Red for Sandia National Laboratory (DOE) was the first supercomputer in the world to achieve 1 TFLOPS in 1997.
    • ASCI Red is used for large-scale simulation in nuclear weapon development and material analysis.
  • PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) = 1,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS
    • IBM RoadRunner for Los Alamos National Laboratory (DOE) was the first supercomputer to achieve 1 PFLOPS in 2008.
    • Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit (DOE) is the second fastest supercomputer in the world at 148.6 PFLOPS.
    • Fugaku of RIKEN Center for Computational Science (Japan) is the current fastest supercomputer at 415 PFLOPS.
  • EFLOPS (exaFLOPS) = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS
    • November 2024
      • Aurora: 1.9 EFLOPS, Argonne National Lab, Intel
      • Frontier: 2.0 EFLOPS, Oak Ridge National Lab, AMD
      • El Capitan: 2.7 EFLOPS, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, AMD
    • Tianhe 3 (first China Exascale computer, 2020, National University of Defense Technology)
      • China no longer participates in the TOP500 list reporting
    • Subsequent update to Fugaku (first Japan Exascale computer, 2026, RIKEN Center for Computational Science)
    • Europe’s Jupiter, hosted at Julich Supercomputing Center, Germany, will be the first Exascale supercomputer for Europe.
The bragging list (The TOP500 Project)
  • List the 500 most powerful computers in the world.
  • Count FLOPS by having supercomputer runs well-known computationally intensive tasks
    • Solve $Ax=b$, dense random matrix problem.
    • Primarily dense matrix-matrix multiplications.
  • Updated twice a year:
    • International Supercomputing conference (June, Germany)
    • Supercomputing conference (November, US).
  • Website: http://www.top500.org

Why do we need this much speed?

Modern scientific discovery
  • The four modern paradigms of science
    • Theory
    • Experiment
    • Simulation
    • Data analysis
  • Simulation: study things that are too big, too small, too fast, too slow, too expensive, or too dangerous.
  • Data analysis: study data that are too big, too complex, too fast (streaming data), too noisy.
Faster computer gives more details
Hurricane Sandy (2012)
  • the deadliest and most destructive, as well as the strongest hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season,
  • the second-costliest hurricane on record in the United States (nearly $70 billion in damage in 2012),
  • affected 24 states, with particularly severe damage in New Jersey and New York,
  • hit New York City on October 29, flooding streets, tunnels and subway lines and cutting power in and around the city.
Forecast of hurricane sandy on October 26, 2012
Various forecasts of Sandy
Various predictions model for Sandy
  • Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory hurricane model (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
  • Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting model (NOAA/Naval Research Laboratory/Florida State University)
  • European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast model (ECMWF)
  • Global Forecast Model (National Weather Service)
  • Which model is closest to reality?
One of the contributing factors
Computational power for weather forecast in 2013
  • http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2013/02/17/seriously-behind-the-numerical-weather-prediction-gap/
The US has caught up
  • NOAA Weather Computer upgrade
  • Two new supercomputers, Luna and Surge
  • 2.89 PFLOPS each for a total of 5.78 PFLOPS (previous generation is only 776 TFLOPS)
  • Increase water quantity forecast from 4000 locations to 2.7 million locations (700-fold increase in spatial density)
  • Can track and forecast 8 storms at any given time
  • 44.5 million dollars investment
Covid and HPC
  • US HPC Consortium to contribute to Covid research
  • Many other work (published in Nature) include supercomputing usages for molecular dynamic simulation/data analysis.
Manufacturing and HPC
  • For 767 development, Boeing built and tested 77 physical prototypes for wing design.
  • For 787 development, only 11 prototypes were built.
    • Optimized via more than 800,000 hours of computer simulation.
Oil and Gas Exploration improvement with HPC
  • Los Alamos National Lab
  • Development of large-scale data analytic techniques to simulate and predict subsurface fluid distribution, temperature, and pressure
  • This reduces the need for observation wells (has demonstrated commercial success)
Fraud Detection at PayPal
  • 10M+ logins, 13M+ transactions, 300 variables per events
  • ~4B inserts, ~8B selects
  • MPI-like applications, Lustre Parallel File Systems, Hadoop Saved over $700M in fraudulent transactions during first year of deployment