Fastest SuperComputer

[Steinie]

I was just reading that the U.S. has the fastest Super Computer this year beating the Chinese. This part of the article raised an eyebrow...

"The new Summit supercomputer, which incorporates chips from Nvidia Corp. and IBM, cost roughly $200 million, according to Oak Ridge director Thomas Zacharia. The Nvidia chips evolved from technology used to render graphics in videogames."

[jamesmc]

Yeah, but you still feel hungry after using the Chinese computer.

[Dragneye]

That's funny James

Every time I've had to look for a video card, I've used game score criteria. I think its comparable for animation which is what I need it for (the fastest processing of moving objects, per second). I don't know if that's the best way but I don't find anything else.

Just curious; does anyone else find it outrageous that it costs $200 million?

[Finis]

Summit https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/
27,000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs, 9,000 IBM Power9 CPUs, 13 megawatts of power

Yeah, but you still feel hungry after using the Chinese computer.

Must. Stop. Laughing.

[RAYMAN]

Send it to North Korea!

[bitkar]

that specs... and especially that power drain is totally mad!

[Dragneye]

Yeah... and they still 'guess' when forecasting weather.
So, maybe $2-3 billion should solve it? Heck, the U.S. spends more than that in foreign aid; and we have to guess our forecast?
lol
Just a thought.

btw - when buying cards and such for graphics, how do you prioritize which specs are valid? For still frames it may matter, but for playing and rendering animations, speed of output REally matters.

[bitkar]

I think that the better servers they have, the less accurate the weather forcast is.. in the end i just look at radar images and up to the sky :)

For GPUs, I personally tend to choose best performance/price with more bias towards performance, amount of memory, coz games and stuff is more and more texture and memory hungry (+ TDP efficiency and others)

[RAYMAN]

Very simple if you have money get the 1060 card with 6 gig memory if you have more money to burn get the 1070 card with 8 gig of ram! Why? Because for most and many realtime renders the amount of ram is the size of the scene you can load for realtime renders! Get nvidia cards because they work for both cuda and for engines like prorender from radeon! More is nice but not vital!!!!! So its around 400 to 600 $ investment for state of the art..average joe videoperformance!

[Finis]

Rayman makes a good point about realtime rendering. We have been concerned with number of cores for regular PBR but realtime may rely more on other things.

Looking at the numbers the 1070ti is a good deal for higher power and the 1060 6gb is good for medium.

Benchmark speed tests from link show a pleasant surprise. The 1070ti is about equal in speed to the 1080 non-ti. They have the same 8GB memory and about the same number of cores. So the 1070ti is essentially a 1080 for a much lower price.

The Numbers

Code: Select all

CARD		CORES	MEMORY	PRICE	$/core	BM SPEED	BM VALUE
1080ti		3584	11	834	0.23	14023		19.48
1080		2560	8	620	0.24	12277		23.17
1070ti		2432	8	480	0.20	12242		26.05
1060 6Gb	1280	6	360	0.28	8965		31.49

BM = benchmark and value rating from the link above. Higher is better.
Prices are for MSI gaming x cards from microcenter.

Hmm, that was off topic but whatever.