TOP500 Jun2019, Facebook Coin

The new TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers is out and we do our usual quick analysis. Not much changed in the TOP10 but a lot is changing further down the list. Here is a quick take:

• There are 65 new entries in 2019.
• US science is receiving support via DOE sites and academic sites like TACC.
• 26 countries are represented. China continues to widen its lead, now with 219 entries, followed by the US with 116, Japan with 29, France with 19, the UK with 18, Germany with 14, Ireland and the Netherlands with 13 each, and Singapore with 10.
• Vendors substantially reflect the country standings. Lenovo has 175 entries, Inspur 71, and Sugon 63, all in China. Cray with 42 and HPE with 40 (which will combine when their deal closes), followed by Dell at 17 and IBM at 16.  Bull has 21 entries.
• There are a lot of "accidental supercomputers" on the list. These are systems that probably are not be doing much science or AI work but they could, and the vendors counted them and it seems to be within the rules to list them. It's controversial but not a new practice.
• There are several systems listed as "Internet" companies. Hard to tell what that means but it points to the existence of very large clusters in the cloud for whatever purpose. Last year, there was one system listed as Amazon EC2, which remains on the list. This time, there is also one at Facebook. Usually the big social/cloud players don't care to participate, though they obviously could summon the resources to run the benchmarks.
• Just over half of systems use Ethernet as a fabric. A quarter us InfiniBand, nearly 50 use Intel's OmniPath, and the rest, 55, use custom interconnects like the ones Cray provides. The team talks about Cray+HPE entering the interconnect business for real and if so, they will be formidable.
• The majority of entries, 367, do not have any accelerators. 125 use Nvidia GPUs.
• The overwhelming majority of the systems, 478 of them, are based on Intel CPUs. 13 are IBM, and there is 1 system based on Arm provided by Cavium, now part of Marvell.
• So the when it comes to chips, it's an Intel game with a respectable showing by Nvidia when GPUs are used. Alternatives are bound to appear as the tens and tens of AI chips in the works become available and Arm, AMD, and IBM build on. The recently announced system at Oakridge will be all AMD, and that will point to an alternative as well.
• Notably, Intel is listed as the vendor for 2 entries and Nvidia is listed for 4. While Intel has stayed largely away from looking like a system vendor, Nvidia is going for it with its usual alacrity. That, and the pending acquisition of Mellanox by Nvidia should serve as a warning to all system vendors who might feel stuck between treating Nvidia as an important supplier and an up and coming competitor.

CryptoSuper500

Shahin mentions the 2nd edition of the CryptoSuper500 list (really 50 for now), a list developed by his colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod, which was launched last November, and is being released at the same time as the TOP500. The TOP500 has spawned variations that look at different workloads and attributes, for example, the Green500, Graph500, and IO500 lists. CryptoSuper500 was inspired by those lists. The material for the inaugural edition of the CryptoSuper500 list here.
Cryptocurrency mining operations are often pooled and are very much supercomputing class, typically using accelerator technologies such as custom ASICs, FPGAs, or GPUs. Bitcoin is the most notable of such currencies. Scroll down for the top-10 list and see the slides for the full list and the methodology.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry talks about check-out lanes at Target all being down for unknown reasons, though he hesitates to call that a cybersecurity breach. It turned out he's right and the company blamed an "internal technology issue".

Target down (then back up) as cash registers fail and leave long lines

Target's payment systems appeared to be missing the mark the day before Father's Day, as terminals went AWOL for a couple of hours in a number of the company's US retail outlets. The outage caused long lines but prompted an encouraging show of sympathy for Target employees from people on Twitter. And there were some jokes too, of course.

Shahin:

Facebook is expected to release a new cryptocurrency that is already impacting the crypto market.

Here’s what we know so far about the secretive Facebook coin

Facebook is likely to release information about its secretive cryptocurrency project, codenamed Libra, as soon as June 18, TechCrunch reports.

As is traditional with new cryptocurrencies, the social networking giant is expected to release a so-called “white paper” outlining how the currency works and the company’s plans for it.

Dan:

Dan reminds us all of the inimitable Erich Anton Paul von Däniken and his ancient astronauts hypotheses!

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Forty+ different AI chips

What are we going to do with 40+ different AI chips?

This week, the team looks at AI chips again, this time motivated by an article in EE Times about once such chip, Graphcore, and touts it as "the most complex processor" ever at some 20 billion transistors. The VC-backed company out of Bristol, UK is also valued on paper at $1.7b, gaining it the coveted "unicorn" status, apparently the "only western semi-conductor unicorn".

This being one of 40+ such AI chips (and that may be conservative), the odds of success are tough and the task formidable. But even if only 2 or 3 of such chips become successful, that's already a significant disruption to the market.

The Graphcore chip is 16nm, 1.6GHz, and comes in a PCIe card at 300W. You can stack 8 of these in a 4U chassis, so 2.4 kW just for those.

After a mini-rant about respected publications succumbing to clickbaits, the team talks about how cooling will be an issue and calls again for more clarity in performance metrics since the chip is rated at 125 TFlops but we don't know at what precision. Shahin reminds the team of his suggestion to clarify things by including precision in the metric, like DFlops for double precision, and then S for single, H for half, and Q for quarter precision.

Henry talks about how hard it is to build and test complex software like this despite Shahin's view that the modern software stack is too high so the chip need only be concerned with a couple of layers, codes are new and open to getting recompiled, it's increasingly open source, cloud providers and large customers have the wherewithal to do the job, and traditional HPC customers have the willingness to do the work if performance enhancements are there.

No "Catch of the Week" this time since Henry had a hard stop. We're used to it!

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Amdahl's Law and GPUs, Asian Student Cluster Competition

Results of the Asian Student Cluster Competition

In this episode, Dan has just come back from China and reviews the results of the Asian Student Cluster Competition and HPC workshop.

For the first time, a non-mainland-Chinese team wins the top spot. Taiwan takes the gold in part by their stellar performance in HPCG benchmark where they achieved 2 TFlops, some 25% better than the 2nd best team. The system was a 5-node cluster with Infiniband FDR interconnect. Other interesting info is shared on various codes and configurations.

GPUs and Amdahl's Law

Dan also mentions that reports from some of the TOP500 sites suggest that GPUs are doing 93-97% of the computation. This sounds very impressive but Shahin points out that since GPUs have hundreds of cores, they should be doing much better, that 93-97% is in fact not as good as it should be at that scale of system and problem size. He is still waiting for some actual utilization data on GPUs too.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry points out many security cameras, offered by several brands but are all manufactured by the same vendor back in China, have big time vulnerabilities so he's staying away from all of them until further notice. Shahin wonders why they are called "security" cameras!

P2P Weakness Exposes Millions of IoT Devices

A peer-to-peer (P2P) communications technology built into millions of security cameras and other consumer electronics includes several critical security flaws that expose the devices to eavesdropping, credential theft and remote compromise, new research has found.

Shahin:

Shahin talks about Jaguar-Land Rover planning to offer a cryptocurrency wallet to reward drivers that participate in providing traffic and other types of data. He likes their catch phrase: zero emission, zero accident, zero congestion.

ON THE MONEY: EARN AS YOU DRIVE WITH JAGUAR LAND ROVER

Drivers will be able to earn cryptocurrency and make payments on the move using innovative connected car services being tested by Jaguar Land Rover.

Dan:

Dan laments the confiscation of his external camera battery at the airport in China because the spec label was a little worn off and the authorities could not read it to ascertain its safety despite his willingness to get a note from the airline, etc.  Nice expensive battery, but at a medium-sized paperback book, maybe following the rules strictly is not a bad idea.

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In-Memory, Caching, Persistence

Asian Student Cluster Competition

The ever-popular "calendar segment" is back (yes, that is us being sarcastic) as Dan describes his upcoming trip to Dalian, China for the Asian Student Cluster competition. 20 teams are expected to compete, mostly from mainland China, but also from Europe, South America and other parts of Asia. All of them have gone through a rigorous qualifying process. Chinese vendor Inspur provides all the equipment (except for accelerators, which remain the responsibility of the teams) based on the configuration that the teams request. As always, the team, and the rest of humanity, is highly supportive of the student cluster tournaments that take place at SC, ISC, and this Asian one, in addition to many regional supporting events. Dan also lets us know how to go about picking the right seat in the airplane. There's an app for that!

New Optane

Intel’s new Optane is M.2 format with 16GB or 32GB of Opatne and 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of Flash backing it. This made Henry think of history of caching and how people used to go through laborious data placement on outer cylinders of hard disks. Then you had DIMMs with Flash behind it. The discussion goes to the algorithms and policies that manage data movement, which is another form of optimizing workload management, and the different combinations of fast/small/expensive capacity backed up with slower/larger/cheaper capacity. And how persistence impacts this equation and to what extent applications may want to optimize around these. Then there is in-memory processing, ram-disk, and how in the future, the ever-increasing size of memory can make those standard practice.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry is catchless but we can expect a healthy debate. Shahin produces two to make up for it.

Shahin:

Shahin has new reinforcement that IoT and HPC will converge in interesting ways. 1) We all know that IoT is the fountain of data and will generates so much data that you need HPC (and AI) to make sense of them, but 2) what is also very interesting Digital twins will need to simulate and predict the behavior of the real thing.

What we mean when we talk about digital twins

"Watching it prompted me to wonder how much data it takes to create a digital twin. If I had a digital simulacrum of a machine and could apply different environmental or mechanical factors to it, how large could that original simulacrum be? It turns out that’s not how digital twins work. They aren’t virtual doppelgangers. They are actually a series of algorithms that connote how machine moves or behaves. In other words, a twin isn’t a twin so much as it’s…math."

Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa

"A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands. The team comprises a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees who work in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania, according to the people, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program. They work nine hours a day, with each reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two workers based at Amazon’s Bucharest office, which takes up the top three floors of the Globalworth building in the Romanian capital’s up-and-coming Pipera district. The modern facility stands out amid the crumbling infrastructure and bears no exterior sign advertising Amazon’s presence."

Shahin thinks it’s as simple as supervised learning needing supervisors, so the question is the legal framework and jurisdiction issues, and social policy, and not technology.

Dan:

It is time to panic more as Dan shares the story of the Chinese scientist who’s presumably blended monkey and human genes. It’s Planet of the Apes all over again.

Chines Scientists Gene-Hacked Super Smart Human-Monkey Hybrids

"For the first time, scientists have used gene-editing techniques to make monkey brains more humanlike. The monkeys, rhesus macaques, got smarter — they had superior memories to unaltered monkeys, according to recently-published research that’s kicked off a fiery debate among ethicists about how far scientists should be able to take genetic experimentation."

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Black Hole Seen, with Data to Match

Here's this week's synopsis.

Black Holes Visualized

The news of the cool visualization of an actual black hole leads to interesting issues in HPC land. Shahin is at pains to give credit where it is due while considering it as an achievement in data visualization not unlike many others before it. Yes, it's about a fascinating topic, but that's also not unlike many others in the past.

But the team moves on to the real point: the size of the radio data that had to be collected and managed and processed to visualize it. 1.75 PB of raw data from each telescope meant a lot of physical drives that had to be flown to the data center. Henry leads a discussion about the race between bandwidth and data size, various companies’ plans to launch thousands of satellites to help get away from sneakernet, and the imminent arrival of 5G. We've discussed large scale data movement in previous episodes and think it's an important issue for HPC, AI, and Cloud.

Catch of the Week

Henry:
That sneakernet discussion above is it for Henry this week.

Shahin:

Mapping Space Debris (video)

LeoLabs is a company that maps objects in the low Earth orbit (LEO). The visdeo shows actual trajectories of 12,401 low Earth objects in space being tracked on August 24, 2017 by LeoLabs' phased array radars. Video loop shows approx 2 hours of data.

Dan:

Scientists put human gene into monkeys to make them smarter, human-like

Making monkeys more smart and human-like, scientists have used gene-editing to insert human brain gene in a monkey.
For the first time, a team of Chinese scientists made use of gene-editing techniques to make monkey brains more human-like. By the end, the monkeys, rhesus macaques, got smarter and had superior memories as compared to the unaltered monkeys.

The team doubts this is a true story and that leads Shahin to his first rant on the show when he complains about previously reputable publications succumbing to clickbait.

We're More Likely Than Not Living In A Computer Simulation, MIT Professor Suggests

An MIT professor has said he believes it's "more likely than not" that we are living in some kind of simulated universe, given that we ourselves are not far away from being capable of creating hyper-realistic simulations ourselves.

Yet another story that raises eyebrows. This one leads the RFHPC team to create a new award on the spot!

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Enterprises going HPC, Chips go Open Source, China goes for the top spot

We continue to want to make these introductions pretty brief here but not this time, apparently! Here's this week's synopsis.

Nvidia GTC 2019 announcements

We discussed the recent GTC conference. Dan has been attending since well before it became the big and important conference that it is today. We get a quick update on what was covered: the long keynote, automotive and robotics, the Mellanox acquisition, how a growing fraction of enterprise applications will be AI. In agreement with the message from GTC, Shahin re-iterates his long-held belief that the future of enterprise applications will be HPC and once again asserts that AI as we know it today is a subset of HPC. Not everyone agrees. Henry brings up varying precisions in AI and a discussion ensues about what is HPC. There seems to be agreement that regardless of what label you put on it, it is the same (HPC) industry and community that is driving this new trend. And that led to a discussion of selling into the enterprise and the need for new models and vocabulary and such. Speaking of varying precision, there is also Nvidia's new automatic mixed precision capability for Tensorflow and there is a bit of discussion on that.

China plans multibillion dollar investment in supercomputing

On the heels of the Aurora announcement, there was news in the South China Morning Post that the top spot in supercomputing is something the country is investing in. No surprise, but interesting to see, and consistent with the general view that supercomputing drives competitive strength.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data.

Shahin:

MIPS R6 Architecture Now Available for Open Use

MIPS 32-bit and 64-bit architecture – the most recent version, release 6 – will become available Thursday (March 28) for anyone to download at MIPS Open web page. Under the MIPS Open program, participants have full access to the MIPS R6 architecture free of charge – with no licensing or royalty fees.

Dan:

Vengeful sacked IT bod destroyed ex-employer's AWS cloud accounts. Now he'll spent rest of 2019 in the clink

An irate sacked techie who rampaged through his former employer's AWS accounts with a purloined login, nuking 23 servers and triggering a wave of redundancies, has been jailed.  

Dead LAN's hand: IT staff 'locked out' of data center's core switch after the only bloke who could log into it dies

'We can replace it but we have no idea what the config is on the device'

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Multicore Scaling Slow Down, and Fooling AI

The team has an animated discussion about multicore scaling, how easy it seems to be to mislead AI systems, and some good sized catches of the week. A common thread is "data" as is often the case these days.

We continue with making these introductions pretty brief here. This time, we include not only the links but also the first paragraph of the linked page as a block quote so you have a bit more information about what is discussed.

Specialized Chips Won’t Save Us From Impending ‘Accelerator Wall’

As CPU performance improvements have slowed down, we’ve seen the semiconductor industry move towards accelerator cards to provide dramatically better results. Nvidia has been a major beneficiary of this shift, but it’s part of the same trend driving research into neural network accelerators, FPGAs, and products like Google’s TPU. These accelerators have delivered tremendous performance boosts in recent years, raising hopes that they present a path forward, even as Moore’s law scaling runs out. A new paper suggests this may be less true than many would like.

Nice 'AI solution' you've bought yourself there. Not deploying it direct to users, right? Here's why maybe you shouldn't

Top tip: Ask your vendor what it plans to do about adversarial examples.
RSA It’s trivial to trick neural networks into making completely incorrect decisions, just by feeding them dodgy input data, and there are no foolproof ways to avoid this, a Googler warned today.

Catch of the Week

MyEquifax.com Bypasses Credit Freeze PIN

Most people who have frozen their credit files with Equifax have been issued a numeric Personal Identification Number (PIN) which is supposed to be required before a freeze can be lifted or thawed. Unfortunately, if you don’t already have an account at the credit bureau’s new myEquifax portal, it may be simple for identity thieves to lift an existing credit freeze at Equifax and bypass the PIN armed with little more than your, name, Social Security number and birthday.

Announcing the Open Sourcing of Windows Calculator

Today, we’re excited to announce that we are open sourcing Windows Calculator on GitHub under the MIT License. This includes the source code, build system, unit tests, and product roadmap. Our goal is to build an even better user experience in partnership with the community. We are encouraging your fresh perspectives and increased participation to help define the future of Calculator.

Huawei Sues The US, Prodding It to Prove Suspicions

THE WORLD'S LARGEST telecommunications-equipment company, China's Huawei, is suing the US government. But the suit isn't just about US law. It's part of Huawei's larger campaign to defend its role as a global provider of telecom gear amid fears that its technology is or could be used by the Chinese government for spying. In essence, Huawei is challenging the US government to prove its suspicions.

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