It looks more like a private data center with 4000 dedicated machines in the same network to run distributed algorithms than a "single super computer". Are we just "wow-ing" at what is basically a data center here?
It looks more like a private data center with 4000 dedicated machines in the same network to run distributed algorithms than a "single super computer". Are we just "wow-ing" at what is basically a data center here?
If you have an embarrassingly parallel problem, it will run well on this machine but it will also be a waste of the machine's expensive design. Embarrassingly parallel problems run just as well on generic data center hardware. This machine is built for problems that only parallelize effectively with low-latency coordination between nodes. Such problems come up a lot in scientific/engineering simulations but are comparatively rare in general purpose computing environments. General purpose nodes in a cloud computing environment cannot run some of the harder problems this machine runs, at any price. For any non-trivial parallel computing job there comes a crossover point where adding more nodes makes the total time-to-solution longer rather than shorter. This point comes a lot sooner if you don't have dedicated high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects between nodes.
If they are some info on internet about the software stack/architecture of the entire system, I would document myself on that. I didn't explore all the links I posted above yet.
I'm nowhere an expert, and HPC is really specific use case, but there is surely interesting bits to learn from it