[Beowulf] If I were specifying a new custer...

[John Hearns]

Doug,
I think the ARM/Cavium Thunder is going to see a lot of attention.
I saw a report recently from the Bristol/Cray Brunel cluster - they are
offering a range of chemistry codes and OpenFOAM,
compiled up for ARM.
Poke me and I will search for the report - I saw it on a twitter feed.

Regarding the Supermicro MB issue, I think there is egg on the face here.
Apple have robustly denied this,
and things seem to have gone very quiet.
Regarding the Intel Fab issues, what is the public evidence for this?
I guess there may be a lot of industry scuttlebutt around.

My own thoughts on this are that as I always say - in IT follow the herd,
or you will be trampled underfoot.
By that I mean that it is intellectually satisfying to discover a new
architecture/bit transport/programming language which fits exactly to your
problem
and gives a huge increase in time to solution.
Yes, grab onto this and implement it in the short term but dont bet on it
being around for long term (save programming languages)
Look at Beowulfery itself - you are staging a celebration of 20 years of
Beowulfery at SC. It is of course COTS components applied to what
at the time was a field populated by esoteric architectures.
>From my own experience, look at ATM networking. I put a lot of effort into
learning and managing ATM networks. Technically it is superior.
But development stalled at 622Mbps and with too few companies supplying kit
there was no effort in writing drivers for OS updates.
So we see the ubiquity of Ethernet - or what at the high end probably
pretends to be Ethernet (I am referring to the zero loss RDMA networks).

What I am saying is the next generation will be that which is created by
the Web Scale generation. Kubernetes clusters running CoreOS.
Containers - and we already have seen comments from our friends in
Singularity that the Open Container Initiative is basically a copy of
Docker and is not appropriate for HPC (this is another discussion to be
had).
I will now be controversial.  The choice of CPUs / GPUs/ TPUs/ FPGAs or any
accelerators in your next generation cluster
will be the ones chosen for use by Amazon (Azure, Google, Baidu....). these
are the ones where the industry will be putting in the effort - as they are
the biggest market.
Remember - run with the herd or you will be trampled underfoot.


(ps. Is this worthy of a Clustermonkey blog article?  More like a blog
rant...)


On Fri, 12 Oct 2018 at 03:18, Jonathan Engwall <
engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com> wrote:

> You can narrow things down for instance you could start with warranty and
> support. Location is a factor too. You want every kind of stability,
> reliable power, cold water and to be near your suppliers, factoring in
> airports or interstate highways.
>
>
> On October 11, 2018, at 3:07 PM, Chris Samuel <chris at csamuel.org> wrote:
>
> On 12/10/18 08:50, Scott Atchley wrote:
>
> > Perhaps Power9 or Naples with 8 memory channels? Also, Cavium ThunderX2.
>
> I'm not sure if Power or ARM (yet) qualify for a general HPC workload
> that Doug mentions; sadly a lot of the commercial codes are only
> available for x86-64 these days. MATLAB dropped PowerPC support back in
> 2007 for instance.
>
> All the best,
> Chris (still in the UK)
> --
>   Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC
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