Re:Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
by gnufx on Monday June 22, 2020 @02:07PM
(#23603535)
Summit and Sierra, for instance, actually run a fair range of applications fast, though Sierra is probably targetted mainly at weapons simulation-type tasks. A typical HPC system for research, e.g. university or regional, has to be pretty general purpose.
Re:Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
by timthorn on Monday June 22, 2020 @12:29PM
(#23602102)
Step by step instructions for building an Arm-based MPI cluster using Raspberry Pis:
https://epcced.github.io/wee_archlet/
If you want to play with it at home, connect those laptops to an ethernet network and install MPI on them both--you should be able to find tutorials with a little web searching. Then you could probably run Linpack if you felt like it, but if you wanted to learn a little more about how HPC applications actually work, you could write your own MPI application. I wrote an MPI raytracer in college; it's a relatively quick project and, again, you can probably find a tutorial for it online.
Edit: Your cluster is going to suck terribly in comparison to "real" supercomputers, but scientists frequently do build their own small-scale clusters for application development. The actual big machines like Sequoia are all batch-processing and must be scheduled in advance, so it's a lot easier (and cheaper, supercomputer time costs money) to test your application locally in real-time.