Here on the cusp of the new year, the catchphrase 2020 hindsight has a distinctly different feel. Good riddance, yes. But also proof of sciences power to mobilize and do good when called upon. Theres gratitude by those who came through less scathed, and, maybe more willingness to assist those who didnt.

Despite the unrelenting pandemic, high performance computing (HPC) proved itself an able member of the worldwide community of pandemic fighters. We should celebrate that, perhaps quietly since the work isnt done. HPC made a significant difference in speeding up and enabling vastly distributed research and funneling the results to those who could turn them into patient care, epidemiology guidance, and now vaccines. Remarkable really. Necessary, of course, but actually got done too. (Forget the quarreling; thats who we are.)

Across the Tabor family of publications, weve run more than 200 pandemic-related articles. I counted nearly 70 significant pieces in HPCwire. The early standing up of Fugaku at RIKEN, now comfortably astride the Top500 for a second time and by a significant margin, to participate in COVID-19 research is a good metaphor for HPCs mobilization. Many people and organizations contributed to the HPC v. pandemic effort and that continues.

Before spotlighting a few pandemic-related HPC activities and digging into a few other topics, lets do a speed-drive through the 2020 HPC/AI technology landscape.

Consolidation continued among chip players (Nvidia/Arm, AMD/Xilinx) while the AI chip newcomers (Cerebras, Habana (now Intel), SambaNova, Graphcore et. al.) were winning deals. Nvidias new A100 GPU is amazing and virtually everyone else is taking potshots for just that reason. Suddenly RISC-V looks very promising. Systems makers weathered 2020s storm with varying success while IBM seems to be winding down its HPC focus; it also plans to split/spin off its managed infrastructure services. Firing up Fugaku (notably a non-accelerated system) quickly was remarkable. The planned Frontier (ORNL) supercomputer now has the pole position in the U.S. exascale race ahead of the delayed Aurora (ANL).

The worldwide quantum computing frenzy is in full froth as the U.S. looks for constructive ways to spend its roughly $1.25 billion (U.S. Quantum Initiative) and, impressively, China just issued a demonstration of quantum supremacy. Theres a quiet revolution going on in storage and memory (just ask VAST Data). Nvidia/Mellanox introduced its line of 400 Gbs network devices while Ethernet launched its 800 Gbs spec. HPC-in-the-cloud is now a thing not a soon-to-be thing. AI is no longer an oddity but quickly infusing throughout HPC (That happened fast).

Last but not least, hyperscalers demonstrably rule the IT roost. Chipmakers used to, consistently punching above their weight (sales volume). Not so much now:

Ok then. Apologies for the many important topics omitted (e.g. exascale and leadership systems, neuromorphic tech, software tools (can oneAPI flourish?), newer fabrics, optical interconnect, etc.).

Lets start.

I want to highlight two HPC pandemic-related efforts, one current and one early on, and also single out the efforts of Oliver Peckham, HPCwires editor who leads our pandemic coverage which began in earnest with articles on March 6 (Summit Joins the Fight Against the Coronavirus) and March 13 (Global Supercomputing Is Mobilizing Against COVID-19). Actually, the very first piece Tech Conferences Are Being Canceled Due to Coronavirus, March 3 was more about interrupted technology events and we picked it up from our sister pub, Datanami which ran it on March 2. Weve since become a virtualized event world.

Heres an excerpt from the first Summit piece about modeling COVID-19s notorious spike:

Micholas Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tennessee/ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics (UT/ORNL CMB), used early studies and sequencing of the virus to build a virtual model of the spike protein.[A]fter being granted time on Summit through a discretionary allocation, Smith and his colleagues performed a series of molecular dynamics simulations on the protein, cycling through 8,000 compounds within a few days and analyzing how they bound to the spike protein, if at all.

Using Summit, we ranked these compounds based on a set of criteria related to how likely they were to bind to the S-protein spike, Smith said in aninterviewwith ORNL. In total, the team identified 77 candidate small-molecule compounds (such as medications) that they considered worthy of further experimentation, helping to narrow the field for medical researchers.

It took us a day or two whereas it would have taken months on a normal computer, said Jeremy Smith, director of UT/ORNL CMB and principal researcher for the study. Our results dont mean that we have found a cure or treatment for the Wuhan coronavirus. We are very hopeful, though, that our computational findings will both inform future studies and provide a framework that experimentalists will use to further investigate these compounds. Only then will we know whether any of them exhibit the characteristics needed to mitigate this virus.

The flood (and diversity) of efforts that followed was startling. Olivers advice on what to highlight catches the flavor of the challenge: You could go with something like the Fugaku vs. COVID-19 piece or the grocery store piece, maybe contrast them a bit, earliest vs. current simulations of viral particle spreador something like the LANL retrospective piece vs. the piece I just wrote up on their vaccine modeling. Think that might work for a how far weve come angle, either way.

Theres too much to cover.

Last week we ran Olivers article on LANL efforts to optimize vaccine distribution (At Los Alamos National Lab, Supercomputers Are Optimizing Vaccine Distribution). Heres a brief excerpt:

The new vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have been deemed highly effective by the FDA; unfortunately, doses are likely to be limited for some time. As a result, many state governments are struggling to weigh difficult choices should the most exposed, like frontline workers, be vaccinated first? Or perhaps the most vulnerable, like the elderly and immunocompromised? And after them, whos next?

LANL was no stranger to this kind of analysis: earlier in the year, the lab had used supercomputer-powered tools like EpiCast to simulate virtual cities populated by individuals with demographic characteristics to model how COVID-19 would spread under different conditions. The first thing we looked at was whether it made a difference to prioritize certain populations such as healthcare workers or to just distribute the vaccine randomly,saidSara Del Valle, the LANL computational epidemiologist who is leading the labs COVID-19 modeling efforts. We learned that prioritizing healthcare workers first was more effective in reducing the number of COVID cases and deaths.

You get the idea. The well of HPC efforts to tackle and stymie COVID-19 is extremely deep. Turning unproven mRNA technology into a vaccine in record time was awe-inspiring and required many disciplines. For those unfamiliar with mRNA mechanism heres a brief CDC explanation as it relates to the new vaccines. Below are links to a few HPCwirearticles on the worldwide effort to bring HPC computational power to bear. (The last is a link to the HPCwire COVID-19 Archive which has links to all our major pandemic coverage):

COVID COVERAGE LINKS

Global Supercomputing Is Mobilizing Against COVID-19 (March 12, 2020)

Gordon Bell Special Prize Goes to Massive SARS-CoV-2 Simulations (November 19, 2020)

Supercomputer Research Leads to Human Trial of Potential COVID-19 Therapeutic Raloxifene (October 29, 2020)

AMDs Massive COVID-19 HPC Fund Adds 18 Institutions, 5 Petaflops of Power (September 14, 2020)

Supercomputer-Powered Research Uncovers Signs of Bradykinin Storm That May Explain COVID-19 Symptoms (July 28, 2020)

Researchers Use Frontera to Investigate COVID-19s Insidious Sugar Coating (June 16, 2020)

COVID-19 HPC Consortium Expands to Europe, Reports on Research Projects (May 28, 2020)

At SC20, an Expert Panel Braces for the Next Pandemic (December, 17, 2020)

Whats New in Computing vs. COVID-19: Cerebras, Nvidia, OpenMP & More (May 18, 2020)

Billion Molecules Against COVID-19 Challenge to Launch with Massive Supercomputing Support (April 22, 2020)

Pandemic Wipes Out 2020 HPC Market Growth, Flat to 12% Drop Expected (March 31, 2020)

[emailprotected]Turns Its Massive Crowdsourced Computer Network Against COVID-19 (March 16, 2020)

2020 HPCwire Awards Honor a Year of Remarkable COVID-19 Research (December, 23, 2020)

HPCWIRE COVID-19 COVERAGE ARCHIVE

Making sense of the processor world is challenging. Microprocessors are still the workhorses in mainstream computing with Intel retaining its giant market share despite AMDs encroachment. That said, the rise of heterogeneous computing and blended AI/HPC requirements has shifted focus to accelerators. Nvidias A100 GPU (54 billion transistors on 826mm2of silicon, worlds largest seven-nanometer chip) was launched this spring. Then at SC20 Nvidia announced an enhanced version of the A100, doubling its memory to 80GB; it now delivers 2TB/s of bandwidth. The A100 is an impressive piece of work.

The A100s most significant advantage, says Rick Stevens, associate lab director, Argonne National Laboratory, is its multi-instance GPU capability.

For many people the problem is achieving high occupancy, that is, being able to fill the GPU up because that depends on how much work you have to do. [By] introducing this MIG, this multi instance stuff that they have, theyre able to virtualize it. Most of the real-world performance wins are actually kind of throughput wins by using the virtualization. What weve seen isour big performance improvement is not that individual programs run much faster its that we can run up to seven parallel things on each GPU. When you add up the aggregate performance, you get these factors of three to five improvement over the V100, said Stevens.

Meanwhile, Intels XE GPU line is slowly trickling to market, mostly in card form. At SC20 Intel announced plans to make its high performance discrete GPUs available to early access developers. Notably, the new chips have been deployed at ANL and will serve as a transitional development vehicle for the future (2022) Aurora supercomputer, subbing in for the delayed IntelXE-HPC (Ponte Vecchio) GPUs that are the computational backbone of the system.

AMD, also at SC20, launched its latest GPU the MI100. AMD says it delivers 11.5 teraflops peak double-precision (FP64), 46.1 teraflops peak single-precision matrix (FP32), 23.1 teraflops peak single-precision (FP32), 184.6 teraflops peak half-precision (FP16) floating-point performance, and 92.3 peak teraflops of bfloat16 performance. HPCwire reported, AMDs MI100GPU presents a competitive alternative to Nvidias A100 GPU, rated at 9.7 teraflops of peak theoretical performance. However, the A100 is returning even higher performance than that on its FP64 Linpack runs. It will be interesting to see the specs of the GPU AMD eventually fields for use in its exascale system wins.

The stakes are high in what could become a GPU war. Today, Nvidia is the market leader in HPC.

Turning back to CPUs, which many in HPC/AI have begun to regard as the lesser of CPU/GPU pairings. Perhaps that will change with the spectacular showing of Fujitsus A64FX at the heart of Fugaku. Nvidias proposed acquisition of Arm, not a done deal yet (regulatory concerns), would likely inject fresh energy in what was already a surging Arm push into the datacenter. Of course, Nvidia has jumped into the systems business with its DGX line and presumably wants a home-grown CPU. The big mover of the last couple of years, AMDs Epyc microprocessor line, continues its steady incursion into Intel x86 territory.

Theres not been much discussion around Power10 beyond IBMs summer announcement that Power10 would offer a ~3x performance gain and ~2.6x core efficiency gain over Power9. The new executive director of OpenPOWER Foundation, James Kulina, says attracting more chipmakers to build Power devices is a top goal. Well see. RISC-V is definitely drawing interest but exactly how it fits into the processor puzzle is unclear. Esperanto unveiled a RISC-V based chip aimed at machine learning with 1,100 low-power cores based on the open-source RISC-V. Esperanto reported a goal of 4,000 cores on a single device. Europe is betting on RISC-V. However, at least near-term, RISC-V variants are seen as specialized chips.

The CPU waters are murkier than ever.

Sort of off in a land of their own are AI chip/system players. Their proliferation continues with the early movers winning important deployments. Some observers think 2021 will start sifting winners from the losers. Lets not forget that last year Intel stopped development of its newly-acquired Nervana line in favor of its even more newly-acquired Habana products. Its a high-risk, high-reward arena still.

PROCESSOR COVERAGE LINKS

Intel Xe-HP GPU Deployed for Aurora Exascale Development

Is the Nvidia A100 GPU Performance Worth a Hardware Upgrade?

LLNL, ANL and GSK Provide Early Glimpse into Cerebras AI System Performance

David Patterson Kicks Off AI Hardware Summit Championing Domain Specific Chips

Graphcores IPU Tackles Particle Physics, Showcasing Its Potential for Early Adopters

Intel Debuts Cooper Lake Xeons for 4- and 8-Socket Platforms

Intel Launches Stratix 10 NX FPGAs Targeting AI Workloads

Nvidias Ampere A100 GPU: Up to 2.5X the HPC, 20X the AI

AMD Launches Three New High-Frequency Epyc SKUs Aimed at Commercial HPC

IBM Debuts Power10; Touts New Memory Scheme, Security, and Inferencing

AMDs Road Ahead: 5nm Epyc, CPU-GPU Coupling, 20% CAGR

AI Newcomer SambaNova GAs Product Lineup and Offers New Service

Japans AIST Benchmarks Intel Optane; Cites Benefit for HPC and AI

Storage and memory dont get the attention they deserve. 3D XPoint memory (Intel and Micron), declining flash costs, and innovative software are transforming this technology segment. Hard disk drives and tape arent going away, but traditional storage management approaches such as tiering based on media type (speed/capacity/cost) are under attack. Newcomers WekaIO, VAST Data, and MemVerge are all-in on solid state, and a few leading-edge adopters (NERSC/Perlmutter) are taking the plunge. Data-intensive computing driven by the data flood and AI compute requirements (gotta keep those GPUs busy!) are big drivers.

Our storage systems typically see over an exabyte of I/O annually. Balancing this I/O intensive workload with the economics of storage means that at NERSC, we live and breathe tiering. And this is a snapshot of the storage hierarchy we have on the floor today at NERSC. Although it makes for a pretty picture, we dont have storage tiering because we want to, and in fact, Id go so far as to say its the opposite of what we and our users really want. Moving data between tiers has nothing to do with scientific discovery, said NERSC storage architect Glenn Lockwood during an SC20 panel.

To put some numbers behind this, last year we did a study that found that between 15% and 30% of that exabyte of I/O is not coming from our users jobs, but instead coming from data movement between storage tiers. That is to say that 15% to 30% of the I/O at NERSC is a complete waste of time in terms of advancing science. But even before that study, we knew that both the changing landscape of storage technology and the emerging large-scale data analysis and AI workloads arriving at NERSC required us to completely rethink our approach to tiered storage, said Lockwood.

Not surprisingly Intel and Micron (Optane/3D XPoint) are trying to accelerate the evolution. Micron released what it calls a heterogeneous-memory storage engine (HSE) designed for solid-state drives, memory-based storage and, ultimately, applications requiring persistent memory. Legacy storage engines born in the era of hard disk drives have historically failed to architecturally provide for the increased performance and reduced latency of next-generation nonvolatile media, said the company. Again, well see.

Software defined storage leveraging newer media has all the momentum at the moment with all of the established players IBM, DDN, Panasas, etc., mixing those capabilities into their product sets. WekaIO and Intel have battled it out for the top IO500 spot the last couple of years and Intels DAOS (distributed asynchronous object store) is slated for use in Aurora.

The concept of asynchronous IO is very interesting, noted Ari Berman, CEO, BioTeam research consultancy. Its essentially a queue mechanism at the system write level so system waits in the processors dont have to happen while a confirmed write back comes from the disks. So asynchronous IO allows jobs can keep running while youre waiting on storage to happen, to a limit of course. That would really improve the data input-output pipelines in those systems. Its a very interesting idea. I like asynchronous data writes and asynchronous storage access. I can see there very easily being corruption that creeps into those types of things and data without very careful sequencing. It will be interesting to watch. If it works it will be a big innovation.

Change is afoot and the storage technology community is adapting. Memory technology is also advancing.

Micron introduced a 176-layer 3D NAND flash memory at SC230 that it says increases read and write densities by more than 35 percent.JEDEC published the DDR5 SDRAM spec, the next-generation standard for random access memory (RAM) in the summer. Compared to DDR4, the DDR5 spec will deliver twice the performance and improved power efficiency, addressing ever-growing demand from datacenter and cloud environments, as well as artificial intelligence and HPC applications. At launch, DDR5 modules will reach 4.8 Gbps, providing a 50 percent improvement versus the previous generation. Density goes up four-fold with maximum density increasing from 16 Gigabits per die to 64 Gigabits per die in the new spec. JEDEC representatives indicated there will be 8 Gb and 16 Gb DDR5 products at launch.

There are always the wildcards. IBMs memristive technology is moving closer to practical use. One outlier is DNA-based storage. Dave Turek, longtime IBMer, joined DNA storage start-up Catalog this year and, says Catalog is working on proof of concepts with government agencies and a number of Fortune 500 companies. Some of these are whos-who HPC players, but some are non-HPC players many names you would recognizeWere at what I would say is the beginning of the commercial beginning. Again, well see.

STORAGE & MEMORY LINKS

SC20 Panel OK, You Hate Storage Tiering. Whats Next Then?

Intels Optane/DAOS Solution Tops Latest IO500

Startup MemVerge on Memory-centric Mission

HPC Strategist Dave Turek Joins DNA Storage (and Computing) Company Catalog

DDN-Tintri Showcases Technology Integration with Two New Products

Intel Refreshes Optane Persistent Memory, Adds New NAND SSDs

Micron Boosts Flash Density with 176-Layer 3D NAND

DDR5 Memory Spec Doubles Data Rate, Quadruples Density

IBM Touts STT MRAM Technology at IDEM 2020

The Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Landscape: Whos Leading?

Its tempting to omit quantum computing this year. Too much happened to summarize easily and the overall feel is of steady carry-on progress from 2019. There was, perhaps, a stronger pivot at least by press release count towards seeking early applications for near-term noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers. Ion trap qubit technology got another important player in Honeywell which formally rolled out its effort and first system. Intel also stepped out from the shadows a bit in terms of showcasing its efforts. D-Wave launched a giant 5000-qubit machine (Advantage), again using a quantum annealing approach thats different from universal gate-based quantum system. IBM announced a stretch goal of achieving one million qubits!

Calling quantum computing a market is probably premature but monies are being spent. The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) and Hyperion Research issued a forecast that projects the global quantum computing (QC) market worth an estimated $320 million in 2020 to grow 27% CAGR between 2020 and 2024. That would reach approximately $830 million by 2024. Chump change? Perhaps but real activity.

IBMs proposed Quantum Volume metric has drawn support as a broad benchmark of quantum computer performance. Honeywell promoted the 128QV score of its launch system. In December IBM reported it too had achieved a 128QV. The first QV reported by IBM was 16 in 2019 at the APS March meeting. Just what a QV of 128 means in determining practical usefulness is unclear but it is steady progress and even Intel agrees that QV is as good as any measure at the moment. DoE is also working on benchmarks, focusing a bit more on performance on given workloads.

[One] major component of benchmarking is asking what kind of resources does it take to run this or that interesting problem. Again, these are problems of interest to DoE, so basic science problems in chemistry and nuclear physics and things like that. What well do is take applications in chemistry and nuclear physics and convert them into what we consider a benchmark. We consider it a benchmark when we can distill a metric from it. So the metric could be the accuracy, the quality of the solution, or the resources required to get a given level of quality, said Raphael Pooser, PI for DoEs Quantum Testbed Pathfinder project at ORNL, during an HPCwire interview.

Next year seems likely to bring more benchmarking activity around system quality, qubit technology, and performance on specific problem sets. Several qubit technologies still vie for sway superconducting, trapped ion, optical, quantum dots, cold atoms, et al. The need to operate at near-zero (K) temps complicates everything. Google claimed achieving Quantum Supremacy last year. This year a group of China researchers also did so. The groups used different qubit technologies (superconducting v. optical) and Chinas effort tried to skirt criticisms that were lobbed at Googles effort. Frankly, both efforts were impressive. Russia reported early last year it would invest $790 million in quantum with achieving quantum supremacy as one goal.

Whats happening now is a kind of pell-mell rush among a larger and increasingly diverse quantum ecosystem (hardware, software, consultants, governments, academia). Fault tolerant quantum computing still seems distant but clever algorithms and error mitigation strategies to make productive use of NISQ systems, likely on narrow applications, look more and more promising.

Here are a few snapshots:

The persistent question is when will all of these efforts pay off and will they be as game-changing as many believe. With new money flowing into quantum, one has the sense there will be few abrupt changes in the next couple years barring untoward economic turns.

QUANTUM COVERAGE LINKS

IBMs Quantum Race to One Million Qubits

Googles Quantum Chemistry Simulation Suggests Promising Path Forward

Intel Connects the (Quantum) Dots in Accelerating Quantum Computing Effort

D-Wave Delivers 5000-qubit System; Targets Quantum Advantage

Honeywell Debuts Quantum System, Subscription Business Model, and Glimpse of Roadmap

Global QC Market Projected to Grow to More Than $800 million by 2024

ORNLs Raphael Pooser on DoEs Quantum Testbed Project

RigettiComputing Wins $8.6M DARPA Grant to Demonstrate Practical Quantum Computing

Braket: Amazons Cloud-First Quantum Environment Is Generally Available

IBM-led Webinar Tackles Quantum Developer Community Needs

Microsofts Azure Quantum Platform Now Offers Toshibas Simulated Bifurcation Machine

As always theres personnel shuffling. Lately hyperscalers have been taking HPC folks. Two long-time Intel executives, Debra Goldfarb and Bill Magro, recently left for the cloud Goldfarb to AWS as director for HPC products and strategy, and Magro to Google as CTO for HPC. Going in the other direction, John Martinis left Googles quantum development team and recently joined Australian start-up Silicon Quantum Computing. Ginny Rometty, of course, stepped down as CEO and chairman at IBM. IBMs long-time HPC exec Dave Turek left to take position with DNA storage start-up, Catalog, and last January, IBMer Brad McCredie joined AMD as corporate VP, GPU platforms.

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Farewell 2020: Bleak, Yes. But a Lot of Good Happened Too - HPCwire