IBM Preps Power9 for AI and HPC Launch, Forges Big NUMA Iron

https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/10/16/ibm-preps-power9-ai-hpc-launch-forges-big-numa-iron/

by rbanffy • 9 years ago

58 47 9 years ago

nextplatform.com

dman6• 9 years ago

Will ordinary programmers be able to buy one?

dogma11382• 9 years ago

The NVIDIA DGX station has one ;)

dman6• 9 years ago

The NVIDIA DGX is available for purchase in select countries and is priced at:

DGX with P100 at $129,000*

DGX with V100 at $149,000

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duality• 9 years ago

Sadly, it's only for extraordinary programmers.

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throwawaysml9• 9 years ago

I don't know, I mean, programmers spend so much money and little value hardware just for brand value and such, so the money is there. But those that spend that amount of money on computers are seldom in the group of those who have an interested in a POWER machine.

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brudgers• 9 years ago

Renting one probably makes more sense for an ordinary programmer. If the chip is $5000, that's a lot of workload on a cloud server.

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dman6• 9 years ago

Hopefully we will see this on a public cloud somewhere. I think there is a great business opportunity for someone to start a commercial hardware lab for developers which gives remote access to new / upcoming hardware. Would gladly pay 50-100 (possibly more depending on whats offered) bucks a month if I could get access to new GPUs / CPUs / networking gear / FPGAS etc. Would allow me to significantly downsize my homelab.

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sp3323• 9 years ago

Raptor PCs are already taking pre-orders. https://raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html They start at $4,700 for a complete system (the desktop) or $2,400 if you just want the motherboard and one CPU.

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rbanffy3• 9 years ago

I couldn't find the exact CPU model it can use.

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bunderbunder2• 9 years ago

Why buy? As long as you don't care what specific CPUs you're running, it's usually way cheaper to rent.

Personal example: Over the course of earning my master's, I was able to use the equivalent of a $FIVE_DIGIT_PRICE computing cluster as often as I cared to, for an ultimate total of $THREE_DIGIT_PRICE.

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dman6• 9 years ago

Yes that works very well for x86 (of the intel variety) and for GPUS of the Nvidia variety. For other options there isnt much available. Also if you are developing client side software you notice that most popular CPU sku's for consumers dont show up in any cloud, so it is hard to reason about performance without having access to them. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, would be great if someone built a service where one could rent a box with any cpu ever sold in the last 10 years (same with GPUS).

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fdchn2016• 9 years ago

Raptor CS is putting the power9 in within the range of an above average programmer (earning above average wages). You can get a decent config for about USD 16000.

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throwawaysml9• 9 years ago

There used to be remote access offered by IBM and Uni of Oregon for open source developers to do porting work.

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gok• 9 years ago

"Oak Ridge is getting around 4,600 Witherspoon nodes to crest above 200 petaflops of peak performance with Summit, most of which comes from the six “Volta” GPU accelerators in the system…"

The CPUs in HPC increasingly exist primarily to keep the GPUs fed. I'm curious why they don't target having simpler/cheaper CPUs that can be moved closer to the GPUs. Throw away stuff like SIMD units; anything that can be done there would be better done on the massively parallel GPU.

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deepnotderp• 9 years ago

CPUs are still often used for graph algorithms and other workloads that either don't map very well to the gpu model of parallelism or contain nontrivial control flow.

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justin662• 9 years ago

I'm curious why they don't target having simpler/cheaper CPUs that can be moved closer to the GPUs.

You can certainly buy silicon that's set up that way from Nvidia.

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torpcoms5• 9 years ago

Can you provide a link? Is it an ARM system?

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gh02t• 9 years ago

They still value raw CPU grunt for legacy software that can't easily be ported to use GPU. There's a lot of old software that has received billions in verification and validation work (especially in the nuclear area, which is important for DoE's mission) and porting it to GPU would invalidate that. This software is typically being replaced by more modern stuff, but it is often validated against its predecessor, so you still need to have the resources to run the older software.

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bradfa• 9 years ago

My understanding was that one of POWER's biggest selling points is the huge number of memory channels each socket can support and the way that the CPU connects to the accelerators, which other platforms don't enable, using interfaces like OpenCAPI and BlueLink. Nvidia has been working with IBM closely on this, I gather.

Info: https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/10/17/opening-server-bus-c...

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torpcoms5• 9 years ago

Because there is latency and overhead involved when shuffling things to the GPU, and a lot of the focus on POWER these days is on OpenCAPI/NVLink. If there is an ARM chip fast enough to make OpenCAPI support worthwhile, I would be interested to hear about it.

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kev0093• 9 years ago

I got IBM to fund the FreeBSD port, they will be at the upcoming devsummit https://wiki.freebsd.org/VendorSummit/201711. My interest is in commercial workloads.. the memory and I/O bandwidth are right where they need to be, and everything else about the uarch is gravy (ISA is quite nice for network processing, byte swapping load/stores, nice short fat pipeline, massive cache)

Pricing is actually quite good with the SuperMicro POWER9 systems, especially against Intel's "scalable processor" family regression where you pay a 4 or 8 socket CPU tax for 2 socket Intel SPP Gold and Platinum configs.

I think POWER9 will be both the first and most cost effective way to reach 400gbps content delivery in a 1u platform.

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throwawaysml9• 9 years ago

That's cool, may I ask how you persuaded them to bring the FreeBSD port up to date?

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kev0093• 9 years ago

Your other comment about NFLX makes you seem suspiciously and hilariously like a sock-puppet account so I can't actually be candid on that now.

For getting vendors to do things, it helps that I have a 8-figure HW spend. I'm not GOOG/FB, but it's enough in what vendors call "cloud services provider" tally that their sales orgs are very hungry for. I have great and fledgling relationships with Intel, SuperMicro, Dell, Chelsio, Cavium, and now IBM in the context of FreeBSD for high throughput scale out workloads.

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throwawaysml9• 9 years ago

When the recent Netflix FreeBSD kernel optimization article was posted, all I could think of was why they didn't use a POWER machine for its higher memory throughput. Same would be true for SPARC, but that hardware is even less available and I wouldn't trust Oracle with my money or engineering effort.

Then I checked to see FreeBSD's POWER port and it didn't look as readily supported as Linux is, so I assumed that's one reason. Contrary to SPARC, POWER servers can be had from more than the main vendor and it's the only high performance server where you have a chance to get the source code for the microcode and firmware in auxiliary mainboard chips, leaving just the GPU and NIC. This alone I would think would be a reason for safety-conscious users to consider and buy it instead of trying to disable Intel ME.

I still think Netflix ought to evaluate POWER9 (POWER10) and possibly improve the FreeBSD port, and would love more industry support so that little teams like mine stand a chance to get reasonably priced POWER9+ servers.

The completely free aspect is one reason I believe Kollab is using it for their servers.

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vvladymyrov• 9 years ago

why Netflix didn't use a POWER machine for its higher memory throughput.

Probably because there is no POWER9/10 option available from AWS and Netflix is a heavy user of AWS.

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wickberg• 9 years ago

The Netflix Open Connect appliances are custom-built hardware they send out to ISPs. [1]

As evidenced by their heroic efforts to tunes performance[2], and their careful choice of hardware[3], they could certainly deploy POWER if they chose to.

[1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

[2] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/cdb51dda3b99

[3] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/hardware/

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achamayou• 9 years ago

SPARCs could (and can still) be had from Fujitsu too. But it’s essentially a dead ISA at this point unfortunately.

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torpcoms5• 9 years ago

For anyone curious about that source code, it is here:

https://github.com/open-power

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throwawaysml9• 9 years ago

BTW, the new POWER chips can run in a new endiannes mode and therefore lift the big-endian requirement, if that's a concern of any code base.

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torpcoms5• 9 years ago

POWER and PowerPC chips have been bi-endian for a while. Since POWER3 would be my guess.

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throwawaysml9• 9 years ago

Speaking of NUMA, I'm glad that AMD Threadrypper will force more developers to get familiar with it, since it's the first mainstream single-socket system that uses it. It will bring it to the attention of more developers than just those who tested regularly on multi-socket machines of their employers.

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IBM Preps Power9 for AI and HPC Launch, Forges Big NUMA Iron

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