[Aardwolf]

Apparently the first petaflops computer was Roadrunner in 2008 [1]

So the supercomputer speed went 1000x from 2008-2022. But home computer speeds definitely did not go up that much, it was maybe around 10x. Does this mean there is more potential for home computers in the future?

Of course the supercomputers are massively parallel, but it's not like they got a 100x times larger building, or do they?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunner_(supercomputer)

[dagw]

So the supercomputer speed went 1000x from 2008-2022. But home computer speeds definitely did not go up that much

A lot of it is simply scale. This computer has ~8 million cores compared to ~12k full cores and ~100k "processing units" on the Roadrunner.

Secondly we have fundamentally changed how we do computation, by learning how to utilise GPUs (and GPU like architectures) better. This alone gives a far greater than 10x boost between 2008-2022

[Retric]

Home GPU’s have gotten more than a 10x boost from 2008 to 2022 and current supercomputers are much more expensive than those from 2008.

A 9800 GTX from March 2008 had 432.1 GFLOPS 32FP. A 3060 GTX from February 2021 is at a similar price point and 12.74 TFLOPS 32FP. A 3090 Ti is 40 TFLOPS 32FP or 100x the performance of the 9800 GTX.

[Aardwolf]

The GPU's aren't helping compile code 100x faster or having a 100x faster boot time, so would it be fair to say the 1000x speed increase of the exaflop supercomputers is also mainly for specialized workloads like matrix multiplications, but it wouldn't be 1000x faster than Roadrunner for general purpose computation? how much faster would it be at SAT solving?

[freemint]

> how much faster would it be at SAT solving?

With modern SAT solvers or with historic (single threaded) SAT solvers?

[Aardwolf]

Now that I think of it, maybe I should have given Argon2 hashing instead of SAT as an example.

Argon2 hashing is designed to benefit as little as possible from parallel GPU computations.

[freemint]

Why would you want to do that? What are you even trying to measure?

[Aardwolf]

A measure of speed of running general purpose code, including compiling, operating systems, GUI's, rendering websites, running electron applications, database queries, ... to get an idea of when we can see the 1000x speedup super computers got, to daily applications

[dragontamer]

> specialized workloads like matrix multiplications

They're not so specialized in the scope of supercomputers.

Matrix multiplications are pretty much any "simulation of reality". Be it a nuclear explosion, weather modeling, finite element analysis (aka: simulated car crashes), protein folding, chemical atom-to-atom simulations and more.

> how much faster would it be at SAT solving?

Dumb WalkSAT is embarrassingly parallel and probably would scale to GPUs very easily actually. I admit that I'm not in the field of SAT but there seems to be plenty of research into how to get SAT onto GPUs.

I've personally been playing with BDDs (or really, MDDs for my particular application). Traversal of BDDs / MDDs is embarrassingly parallel, assuming your BDD / MDD is wide enough (which for any "complicated" function, it should be).

BDD / MDD based traversal of SAT / constrain satisfaction is likely going to be a growing area of research, since the problems are closely related. I've also seen some BDD/MDD "estimate" methodologies, akin to how arc-consistency / path-consistency estimates a SAT/Constraint solver.

In effect, if you say "BDD that underestimates the function" and a 2nd BDD that "overestimates the function", you can use BDDs / MDDs to have a lower-bound and upper-bound on some estimates. And those structures can scale from kilobytes to gigabytes, depending on how much or little "estimation" you want.

Does such a thing exist yet? I don't think so. The papers I've read on this subject are from 2018, and they weren't from parallel programmers who know much about high-speed GPU programming. But I definitely believe that there's some synergy here if researchers combine the two fields. You use the GPU to embarassingly parallel calculate the BDD every step to guide a sequential-algorithm search over the SAT/Constraint Satisfaction problems.

Using BDDs (instead of arc-consistency) as your "heuristic" of search is still a relatively unexplored field, but is "very obviously" a way to utilize a GPU if you know how they work.

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Speaking of embarrassingly parallel, I'm pretty sure arc-consistency is also an embarrassingly parallel problem, but arc-consistency is "too inflexible", leading to "too small" (not efficiently utilizing the GBs or TBs of RAM we have today).

Extending the arc-consistency to path-consistency or K-consistency increases the size of the data-structure (and therefore the parallelism and work involved), but not very smoothly.

Instead, the estimated BDD/MDD methodology seems like a magical methodology that scales to different memory sizes better. That is, relaxed BDDs or restricted BDDs for lower-bounds and upper-bounds estimations.