AMD Demos Petaflop-in-a-Rack Supercomputer

AMD CEO Lisa Su introduced the system, dubbed Project 47, as a platform suitable for both deep learning workloads and image rendering applications. Su said the machine is powered by 20 EPYC CPUs and 80 Radeon Instinct GPUs, and contains 10 TB of DDR4 memory.

Top500.org (link below)

YouTube presentation (long intro, just providing a picture of how tall the rack is!)


A rack is the standard measure of equipment. The width is 19 inches. The heights are 1.5 inches. You typically refer to height by the number of units it takes. So if you have a “pizza box” computer, that is 1U high in rack space talk. Got some disk drives connected up by fiber channel? Those are regular disks flipped sideways and are typically 3U in height.

A typical rack height for server rooms are 42U. They also make them free-standing and larger usually up to 58U.
AMD crammed 20, 2U servers into a rack (40U), and it looks like there are a couple 3U items to network the servers together. (6U). Maybe that is why they named it “Project 47”? They crammed it all into 47U spaces? IDK. Just a thought.

A petaFLOP is one quadrillion Floating Point Operations Per-second. Or, "1" with 15 "0"s after it!!

Check the specs:

Project 47 is a joint collaboration between AMD, Inventec, Samsung, and Mellanox. Inventec, a Taiwan-based original design manufacturer (ODM), built and integrated the system, based on its P-series 2U server platform. Samsung supplied the high bandwidth memory (HBM2) memory for the Radeon Instinct cards, as well as DDR4 main memory modules and NVMe SSD storage devices, while Mellanox contributed its EDR (100 Gbps) adapters, cabling, and switches to hook together the 20 servers.

In this case, each server contains a single EPYC 7601 CPU hooked to four Radeon Instinct MI25 GPUs. The advantage of the single-socket EPYC server is that it is able to support plenty of memory, GPU cards, and other PCIe devices, without have to resort to a second CPU installed solely to hook in more componentry. That saves not only the extra expense of the CPU, but power as well -- something AMD has touted as one of the major advantages of its EPYC design.

Top500.org – AMD Demos Petaflop-in-a-Rack Supercomputer.

-And -

InsideHPC.com – AMD Showcases 1 Petaflop “Project 47” Rack at SIGGRAPH.

A 32-bit, petaflop, 10 TB of memory, at 100 GbitPS! All at “30 GigaFLOPS/Watt” (InsideHPC.com article).

No word on pricing!

I scrounged for a month and a half to get 16K for my Timex-Sinclair! That was so I could play Frogger and Space Invaders in black and white!

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

I bet it cant run crysis

a reply to: Spacespider

I was thinking Trey and Matt need one!

And stat!

originally posted by: Spacespider
a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

I bet it cant run crysis

based on its P-series

That would be a safe bet as it is a RISC based cell processor.
Although , that is what the consoles (somewhat) used to run

originally posted by: Spacespider
a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

I bet it cant run crysis

Lol, nothing can run Crysis

originally posted by: Arnie123

originally posted by: Spacespider
a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

I bet it cant run crysis

Lol, nothing can run Crysis

Better answer....

In ye days of olde, an Atari 800 had 16K RAM modules that were the size the Titan Xp's of today.

gury.atari8.info...

Some of the old research papers on fluid dynamics describe the rack mounted systems they made from 16 PC motherboards stacked together into a local cluster. Now all that performance is exceeded by a single GPU card. Now this system is made from a rack of GPU's.

And to think we used to measure compute power in mega-flops (and MIPs) back in the day! We've come a long way I'm glad to see it.

I scrounged for a month and a half to get 16K for my Timex-Sinclair! That was so I could play Frogger and Space Invaders in black and white!

Heh. I always hated it when I moved my Timex Sinclair too much. If I had not backed up to tape (audio tape) I'd lose everything.

Ahhhh, memory lane..

GPU performance is increasing 100x every 2 years. CPU performance reached a plateau until they started writing optimizing compilers that really optimized code for next generation CPU's.

So how long do they expect it to take before it becomes sentient and kills us all?

a reply to: stormcell
a reply to: LogicalGraphitti

A graphic interface with a mouse (Apple I and II) was such a huge advancement! I remember going over to my buddy's house just to try pointing and clicking! Seemed so weird back then!

Now it 32-cores, 64-threads, working with the graphic card to compute right out of the box!

80s... about 35 years. That is some progress from hand soldered chips to 30 petaflop supercomputers to Project47.

a reply to: Blue Shift

Hawking says 30 years. But who knows. Maybe sooner. If we are lucky. They are already making their own language.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
So how long do they expect it to take before it becomes sentient and kills us all?

What, you haven't been uploaded yet?

originally posted by: Apollumi


Ahhhh, memory lane..

Literally!

Although I did love the blue and white connector in the back. It "looked" like something a computer would need!!

originally posted by: chr0naut
What, you haven't been uploaded yet?

Still working on my petaflops.

originally posted by: Arnie123

originally posted by: Spacespider
a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

I bet it cant run crysis

Lol, nothing can run Crysis

What is this "crysis" blackmagic you speak of? Please tell

As my current adventures with network connectivity prove, doesn't matter how fast you can do a squadrillion calculations... if you can't connect to the internet doesn't matter how fast you can do calculations.