Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su wowed supercomputer geeks this summer when she showed off the company’s Project 47 at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. In a rack just slightly taller than the MIT-trained Ph.D. CEO herself, Project 47 crammed 20 of AMD’s newest Epyc microprocessor chips inside along with 80 graphics processing units based on the company’s new Vega design and 10 terabytes of memory. The bottom line was a supercomputer that could perform 1 petaflop of calculations per second at a less-than-supercomputer price.
At a petaflop, which is a one followed by 15 zeros worth of calculations per second, that’s as fast as the fastest and priciest supercomputers in the world from 2009 and would rank just outside of the top 100 today. It’s also a testament to how fast progress has come in the past few years of chip designs, especially for graphics processors, which used to be relegated to the domain of video game junkies. And the biggest cloud data center companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, are filling up more racks with GPUs as customers seek to run the kinds of artificial intelligence and machine learning tasks that thrive on the graphics processing architecture....
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http://fortune.com/2017/10/25/data-sheet-amd-supercomputer-vega/
