Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer

Re:Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer by mxcrossb on Monday June 22, 2020 @11:41AM (#23601439)

AWS has made it into the top500 a few times in fact, though not that high on the list. I think the main issue would be reserving enough machines that have a high performance network between them, which is not a typical cloud need.

But the more interesting question for me is: on an embarrassingly parallel workload, how does Amazon’s full infrastructure compare to these top machines? I’d assume that Amazon keeps that a secret.

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Re:Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer by cbkeller on Monday June 22, 2020 @08:52PM (#23608820)

Looking into Amazon's power bill might be a useful start: Fugaku is listed as drawing 28 MW in OP. It's more power efficient than most, but to an order of magnitude that's a number we can work with. Amazon's power usage for US-East was estimated at 1.06 GW in 2017 [1] (at which time they also apparently owned about a gigawatt of renewable generating capacity [2], now closer to 2 GW [3]).

Either way you slice it, Amazon likely owns at least an order of magnitude more FLOPS than any single system on the top500. What they presumably don't have is the low latency interconnects, etc., needed for traditional supercomputing.

[1] https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-approaches-1-gigawatt-...

[2] https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060048034

[3] https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/sustainable-operation...

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