[Beowulf] AMD cards with integrated SSD slots

Prentice Bisbal pbisbal at pppl.gov
Thu Jul 28 07:33:13 PDT 2016


On 07/27/2016 05:53 PM, Brian Oborn wrote:
> I noticed that AMD is coming out with a new line of Pro cards that 
> have two PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots for caching 1TB of content on the card.
>
> http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro-ssg-fiji-with-m2-ssds-onboard
>
> I'm wondering what the list's thoughts are on the following questions:
>
> 1) Is AMD relevant in HPC anymore? In the Top500 list I only found two 
> older systems that had AMD video cards and none that had AMD CPUs. 
> Does anyone here run smaller newer AMD clusters?
Are you talking CPUs or GPUs? As far as their GPUs, when AMD released 
their FirePro S9150 GPU, it was signficantly faster than NVidia's K40. I 
don't think NVidia has released anything new that can beat it yet. The 
K80 is really just 2 K40s in one package.  I haven't been keeping up 
with industry news as much recently, so NVidia could have come out with 
something better since then. AMD has since come out with the FirePro 
S9300 x2, which based on the name, I'm guessing is two S9150s in a 
single package, a la the K80

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2462240/amd-claims-supercomputing-gpu-performance-crown-with-firepro-s9150.html
http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/server/s9300-x2

At SC15, AMD announce that they were adopting CUDA (sort of)

https://www.techpowerup.com/217611/amd-launches-the-boltzmann-initiative-brings-nvidia-cuda-to-firepro
http://wccftech.com/amd-cuda-compilercompatibility-layer-announced-with-the-boltzmann-initiative/

While NVidia is still dominating the GPU field by a large margin, these 
developments show that AMD hasn't given up on the GPU market and has 
made some pretty significant advances in the past couple of years. Only 
time will tell if this is enough to keep them in the game and grab some 
market share, though

>
> 2) Are there many workloads that would benefit from this type of 
> cache? I think trying to juggle GPU RAM, system RAM, GPU storage, 
> system storage, and inter-node networking might make this too 
> difficult to scale beyond a single system?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Brian Oborn
>
>
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