Old Supercomputer vs Modern Day PC?

[Chebron]

Just wondering if anyone has ever explored this topic. How would a supercomputer from decades ago compare to a consumer grade PC today?

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, Chebron said:

Just wondering if anyone has ever explored this topic. How would a supercomputer from decades ago compare to a consumer grade PC today?

Depends on what decade... Your phone is orders of magnitude faster then anything that existed in the 80's. 

[aisle9]

All else being equal (and it's not--time waits for no silicon), it depends on the task. Supercomputers weren't designed to run Fortnite.

[emosun]

11 minutes ago, Chebron said:

decades ago

it would be basically worthless if it's from decades ago (as in multiple)

then again it depends on the size of the super computer and the task. if the task was format 1,000 hard drives then a super computer made up of 1,000 machines would be able to do the task almost 1,000 times faster than a modern machine.

whats the task?

[emosun]

8 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Depends on what decade... Your phone is orders of magnitude faster then anything that existed in the 80's. 

i'd say it depends on the task as well as 1000 commodore 64's could run 1000 instances of a single c64 app vs a cellphone running 1,000 instances of the same app even if it was running natively on the phone. the phone would have the power but not the stability to run that many apps even if they aren't intensive.

Basically multitasking and bus speeds would be the only strength of a decades old super computer provided it was made up of enough machines

[LIGISTX]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

i'd say it depends on the task as well as 1000 commodore 64's could run 1000 instances of a single c64 app vs a cellphone running 1,000 instances of the same app even if it was running natively on the phone. the phone would have the power but not the stability to run that many apps even if they aren't intensive.

Basically multitasking and bus speeds would be the only strength of a decades old super computer provided it was made up of enough machines

Yea, its obviously way more complicated, and a lot of it comes down to optimization of algorithms and programing languages. Something today would struggle to run old "software" as a result of this. But todays chips are amazingly faster.

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Yea, its obviously way more complicated, and a lot of it comes down to optimization of algorithms and programing languages. Something today would struggle to run old "software" as a result of this. But todays chips are amazingly faster.

yeah essentially it would be hard to find an application that was optimized for both 80's era machines and modern ones to have a nice 1 to 1 race

you'd have to generalize the overall task..... which means the modern machine would typically always win

[Chebron]

Interesting, I always had it in my mind that it was like an ASIC vs a regular consumer GPU for mining. I'm guessing supercomputers are designed to do specific things really well and so even older ones would outperform modern hardware that's more muti-purpose.

[emosun]

1 minute ago, Chebron said:

I'm guessing supercomputers are designed to do specific things really well and so even older ones would outperform modern hardware that's more muti-purpose.

to pull back the curtain

most super computers , are a warehouse of plain ... regular .... everyday server racks with normal x86 or power pc servers just networked together with some custom software that distributes the load of a task across all the machines. the tasks are mostly just computational in nature vs any form on "on demand" task like gaming.

an easy to understand example would be instead of a single computer rendering a 60 second 3d animation for 60 hours , you could have a "super computer" made up of 60 machines render one second each and have it done in 1 hour

[HanZie82]

And theres video's like this. Almost an comparison.

 

[Chebron]

3 hours ago, emosun said:

to pull back the curtain

most super computers , are a warehouse of plain ... regular .... everyday server racks with normal x86 or power pc servers just networked together with some custom software that distributes the load of a task across all the machines. the tasks are mostly just computational in nature vs any form on "on demand" task like gaming.

an easy to understand example would be instead of a single computer rendering a 60 second 3d animation for 60 hours , you could have a "super computer" made up of 60 machines render one second each and have it done in 1 hour

So it employs sheer quantity together with quality to get the job done quicker?

[aisle9]

6 hours ago, Chebron said:

So it employs sheer quantity together with quality to get the job done quicker?

That's part of it. Supercomputers are barely even the same thing as a desktop PC. They don't have one processor with a billion cores. They have a billion processors with a billion cores. Here's a quick article on the world's fastest (depending on who you ask) supercomputer, and what it's being used for: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/fastest-supercomputers-frontier-exascale/

[OrdinaryPhil]

There is no comparison.

Supercomputers are not (and have never been) designed for the broad, generic use of consumers. Supercomputers are purpose-built to perform a narrowly defined task, and to do that specific task very well. A computer designed to follow the path of an incoming missile, update its location 1,000 times per second, constantly calculate its speed and trajectory to estimate it's future position so that a defensive weapon can accurately place a shot that takes it out is a VERY powerful computer - it performs VASTLY more operations per cycle than a generic desktop CPU - but that same chip is totally incapably of running Windows or any games... there is simply no way to directly compare their performance.

[Pickles von Brine]

Lets do a super computer from 2009 when avatar was made

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/12/22/the-data-crunching-powerhouse-behind-avatar

 

Quote

The Weta data center got a major hardware refresh and redesign in 2008 and now uses more than 4,000 HP BL2x220c blades (new BL2x220c G6 blades announced last month), 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking gear from Foundry and storage from BluArc and NetApp. The system now occupies spot 193 through 197 in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers.

Thirty four racks comprise the computing core, made of 32 machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory. 

For the last month or more of production those 40,000 processors were handling 7 or 8 gigabytes of data per second, running 24 hours a day. A final copy of Avatar equated to 17.28 gigabytes per minute of storage. For a 166 minute movie the rendering coordination was intense.

 

[whm1974]

Now are talking a PC sold at places like Walmart and such? Or this Built It Yourself almost all of Us here do?

 

Now I'm sure that HEDT CPUs with 16 to 32 Cores w/ SMT, along with Quad Channel memory could run circles around 80's Era Supercomputers. Depends on the other hardware as well. With PCIe SSD Cards, well yes.

[da na]

31 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

Now are talking a PC sold at places like Walmart and such? Or this Built It Yourself almost all of Us here do?

 

Now I'm sure that HEDT CPUs with 16 to 32 Cores w/ SMT, along with Quad Channel memory could run circles around 80's Era Supercomputers. Depends on the other hardware as well. With PCIe SSD Cards, well yes.

if a PC at Walmart couldn't outperform an 80s supercomputer I would cry

[Pickles von Brine]

https://www.theclever.com/15-huge-supercomputers-that-were-less-powerful-than-your-smartphone/

 

Quote

While Deep Blue wasn’t the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1997—its 11.38 gigaflops of processing speed made it the 259^th most powerful—it was probably the most famous. Even though its processing power doesn’t come close to the Galaxy S5 smartphone’s 142 gigaflops, Deep Blue marshalled its total resources to beat the best chess player in the world, Garry Kasparov, trumping him 2:1 in a six-game chess match. But Deep Blue also showed that gigaflops alone don’t make the computer—while it was credited with the win, Kasparov actually forfeited the second match after Deep Blue made a completely illogical move that frustrated the previously unbeaten chess champion. Some experts speculate that the odd chess move was the result of a bug in Deep Blue’s program, not some amazing strategy. This shows that gigaflops alone don’t make a computer great—and explains why, despite their amazing processing speed, smartphones still don’t have the power to control our lives.

 

[whm1974]

7 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

if a PC at Walmart couldn't outperform an 80s supercomputer I would cry

In what way? What about 90's or early 2000's era Supercomputers. Like I told my friend the other day, his daughter didn't buy a good PC from Walmart.com. Has only has 8GB of Memory, 1TB HDD, and it is a AIO.

 

 

[da na]

29 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

In what way? What about 90's or early 2000's era Supercomputers. Like I told my friend the other day, his daughter didn't buy a good PC from Walmart.com. Has only has 8GB of Memory, 1TB HDD, and it is a AIO.

 

 

Supercomputers can't do web browsing. Heck, even my Athlon 64 probably beats an 80s supercomputer. 90s and 2000s supercomputers are probably more powerful but not designed for any normal tasks

[whm1974]

51 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

Supercomputers can't do web browsing. Heck, even my Athlon 64 probably beats an 80s supercomputer. 90s and 2000s supercomputers are probably more powerful but not designed for any normal tasks

Which is why I said for what... This also why I laugh when a few folks talk about building a Supercomputer, or worse Quantum... Some get shocked after showing some price figures for both.

 

Not to long ago, some News Articles online were sprouting some nonsense about Laypeople building Quantum Computers for illegal purposes. Applications for those are Custom and highly specialized.

 

A Beowulf Cluster is actually doable, assuming that the Nodes are Identical and fairly recent hardware. Not mention powerful enough. Didn't someone do this with a bunch of Raspberry Pi's? 

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, Mel0n. said:

Supercomputers can't do web browsing. Heck, even my Athlon 64 probably beats an 80s supercomputer. 90s and 2000s supercomputers are probably more powerful but not designed for any normal tasks

That's not true at all. You can have a default linux environment if you wanted. Most computers running societal critical operations are decades old. 

[BuckGup]

4 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

Which is why I said for what... This also why I laugh when a few folks talk about building a Supercomputer, or worse Quantum... Some get shocked after showing some price figures for both.

 

Not to long ago, some News Articles online were sprouting some nonsense about Laypeople building Quantum Computers for illegal purposes. Applications for those are Custom and highly specialized.

 

A Beowulf Cluster is actually doable, assuming that the Nodes are Identical and fairly recent hardware. Not mention powerful enough. Didn't someone do this with a bunch of Raspberry Pi's? 

Yeah Beowulf is more of a proof of concept as no one actually uses it. Same with a pi cluster. When it comes time to actually do things you will end up having to write your own software/kernel and essentially everything to make it viable/worth while. That's why there are only a handful of companies that will offer HPC contracts. People use HPCM and maybe CSM if they hate themselves.

[whm1974]

4 hours ago, BuckGup said:

Yeah Beowulf is more of a proof of concept as no one actually uses it. Same with a pi cluster. When it comes time to actually do things you will end up having to write your own software/kernel and essentially everything to make it viable/worth while. That's why there are only a handful of companies that will offer HPC contracts. People use HPCM and maybe CSM if they hate themselves.

If I recall in order to be useful, would need four Nodes and one Control PC. And that is just the hardware. Also would need either a *BSD or Linux Distro suitable for Clusters along with Applications needed for use with such things. Is Folding@Home still a thing? Last time I did that, ended up using Chrome, instead of a Shell Program I using. On Linux of course.

 

Using Chrome for F@H does use more Resources as in RAM, CPU, and GPU... I'm sure it is worse with Windows... Which is with Windows, *NIX like, MacOS, and the like, Running on the CLI or Shell is faster.

[igormp]

5 hours ago, BuckGup said:

Yeah Beowulf is more of a proof of concept as no one actually uses it. Same with a pi cluster. When it comes time to actually do things you will end up having to write your own software/kernel and essentially everything to make it viable/worth while. That's why there are only a handful of companies that will offer HPC contracts. People use HPCM and maybe CSM if they hate themselves.

Lots of people do use that kind of stuff to learn at home, but ofc it's not doable for a production environment.

 

Most HPCs actually use Linux or other unices with some management on top of it, like HPCM that you mentioned, but it's not an entire custom kernel.

 

1 hour ago, whm1974 said:

Also would need either a *BSD or Linux Distro suitable for Clusters along with Applications needed for use with such things. Is Folding@Home still a thing? Last time I did that, ended up using Chrome, instead of a Shell Program I using. On Linux of course.

Want a simple way to get a cluster running? Run stuff like k8s on top of it, done, you can run tons of stuff across a cluster in an "easy" way.

 

There are tons of distributed software meant for all kinds of problems. For example, since I work with data, I use Spark on a daily basis to do data processing across many different computers at once.

 

On 8/6/2022 at 2:14 PM, OrdinaryPhil said:

There is no comparison.

Supercomputers are not (and have never been) designed for the broad, generic use of consumers. Supercomputers are purpose-built to perform a narrowly defined task, and to do that specific task very well. A computer designed to follow the path of an incoming missile, update its location 1,000 times per second, constantly calculate its speed and trajectory to estimate it's future position so that a defensive weapon can accurately place a shot that takes it out is a VERY powerful computer - it performs VASTLY more operations per cycle than a generic desktop CPU - but that same chip is totally incapably of running Windows or any games... there is simply no way to directly compare their performance.

That's a ton of misinformation. What you said might've been true for the old, purpose-built supercomputers, but moderns ones use your regular x86/arm/power CPU with similar IPC to a desktop, but with tons of those, extra external accelerators (like GPUs/FPGAs or other ASICs), with a nice way to schedule/orchestrate jobs and allow people to submit different jobs that can be run in a distributed manner.

 

Get a 1000 desktop computers with high-end GPUs and CPUs and tons of ram, network those with infiniband and slap some management software on top of it and you got yourself a supercomputer.

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, igormp said:

Want a simple way to get a cluster running? Run stuff like k8s on top of it, done, you can run tons of stuff across a cluster in an "easy" way.

 

There are tons of distributed software meant for all kinds of problems. For example, since I work with data, I use Spark on a daily basis to do data processing across many different computers at once.

What do mean by k8s? What is Spark? Are you talking about X86-64 CPUs? I could use a SBC  Cluster but with limited options as fewer *NIX likes then with x86 along with Applications, not sure about uses.