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Main Authors: Karp, Martin, Jansson, Niclas, Schlatter, Philipp, Markidis, Stefano
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05639
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author Karp, Martin
Jansson, Niclas
Schlatter, Philipp
Markidis, Stefano
author_facet Karp, Martin
Jansson, Niclas
Schlatter, Philipp
Markidis, Stefano
contents As supercomputers' complexity has grown, the traditional boundaries between processor, memory, network, and accelerators have blurred, making a homogeneous computer model, in which the overall computer system is modeled as a continuous medium with homogeneously distributed computational power, memory, and data movement transfer capabilities, an intriguing and powerful abstraction. By applying a homogeneous computer model to algorithms with a given I/O complexity, we recover from first principles, other discrete computer models, such as the roofline model, parallel computing laws, such as Amdahl's and Gustafson's laws, and phenomenological observations, such as super-linear speedup. One of the homogeneous computer model's distinctive advantages is the capability of directly linking the performance limits of an application to the physical properties of a classical computer system. Applying the homogeneous computer model to supercomputers, such as Frontier, Fugaku, and the Nvidia DGX GH200, shows that applications, such as Conjugate Gradient (CG) and Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), are rapidly approaching the fundamental classical computational limits, where the performance of even denser systems in terms of compute and memory are fundamentally limited by the speed of light.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_05639
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Supercomputers as a Continous Medium
Karp, Martin
Jansson, Niclas
Schlatter, Philipp
Markidis, Stefano
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
F.1; F.2; I.6
As supercomputers' complexity has grown, the traditional boundaries between processor, memory, network, and accelerators have blurred, making a homogeneous computer model, in which the overall computer system is modeled as a continuous medium with homogeneously distributed computational power, memory, and data movement transfer capabilities, an intriguing and powerful abstraction. By applying a homogeneous computer model to algorithms with a given I/O complexity, we recover from first principles, other discrete computer models, such as the roofline model, parallel computing laws, such as Amdahl's and Gustafson's laws, and phenomenological observations, such as super-linear speedup. One of the homogeneous computer model's distinctive advantages is the capability of directly linking the performance limits of an application to the physical properties of a classical computer system. Applying the homogeneous computer model to supercomputers, such as Frontier, Fugaku, and the Nvidia DGX GH200, shows that applications, such as Conjugate Gradient (CG) and Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), are rapidly approaching the fundamental classical computational limits, where the performance of even denser systems in terms of compute and memory are fundamentally limited by the speed of light.
title Supercomputers as a Continous Medium
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
F.1; F.2; I.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05639