[The Exiled]

AMD scores first Top 10 Zen Supercomputer… at nVidia

Selene is the name of the new supercomputer sitting at #7. For host processors, it is using AMD’s Rome 7742 parts, which are the highest performing commercial parts available that aren’t for specialized markets – technically a list price of $6950 each. What makes Selene a bit odd for an AMD win is that it is part of a supercomputer built with nVidia A100 accelerators. And it’s also built for nVidia to use at nVidia. When nVidia announced its new A100 Ampere accelerator card for compute, it also announced the concept of a DGX A100 ‘SuperPod’, connecting 140 DGX A100 nodes and 1120 A100 GPUs to supply up to 700 PetaOPs of AI-based performance.

It turns out that this concept of a SuperPOD also just happens to hit #7 in the TOP500 supercomputer list, which uses more traditional LINPACK FP64 FLOPs, straight off the bat. Each of the DGX A100 nodes contains two AMD EPYC CPUs and eight A100 accelerators. Selene scores a performance of 27.6 PetaFLOPs of FP64 throughput, for 1.3 MegaWatts of power. Compared to the previous Titan supercomputer, which had Opterons and K20x accelerators, that’s 57% more performance for only 16% of the power, making it almost 10x more efficient. Selene uses nVidia’s Mellanox HDR Infiniband for connectivity, and has 560 TiB of memory installed. It’s worth noting that this is technically only 280 EPYC CPUs paired with 1120 A100 GPUs, combined together for 277760 ‘cores’. It seems odd to suggest that 'this is all that is needed' to reach #7.

Izvor: AnandTech