Applying Machine Learning At The Front End Of HPC

IBM and the other vendors who are bidding on the CORAL2 systems for the US Department of Energy can't talk about those bids, which are in flight, and Big Blue and its partners in building the "Summit" supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and "Sierra" at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – that would be Nvidia for GPUs and Mellanox Technologies for InfiniBand interconnect – are all about publicly focusing on the present, since these two machines are at the top of the flops charts now. We know they are actually working hard to win the next deal for the exascale successors to these two machines, but when we had a chat at the SC18 supercomputer conference with Dave Turek, vice president of technical computing and OpenPower, we didn't even bother to bring CORAL2 up. There were other interesting things to discuss. But as an aside: We did talk to Turek about CORAL2 back in June at ISC18, just after the bids for the systems had been turned in to the Department of Energy, and he couldn't say much then except that IBM should get credit for delivering Summit and Sierra more or less as planned and that this should mean a lot when it comes to the CORAL2 bids. But maybe it wouldn't because with each generation of machines, the major labs have to do an architecture survey and take into account any new developments – or lack thereof – that could offer better performance, wider application support, lower prices, or any combination of the above. In a sense, it is always back to square one on these big systems deals, which is good for driving innovation but perhaps something to make the major suppliers a bit testy until they win the deals. It seems inconceivable that the combination of the IBM Power10 chip and a future Nvidia GPU and possibly 400 Gb/sec NDR or 800 Gb/sec XDR InfiniBand won't win the CORAL2 bids, but with Cray back in the game with its own Slingshot interconnect, there is a chance that it could win at least one of the three CORAL2 machines.