[taw28]

There is certainly a requirement that prevents payout on the contract for those supers if performance numbers aren’t met. Further, those performance numbers are from real apps, so the system WILL be useful. Not getting paid is not an option, so performance/usability will come.

[quanto]

how does that contractual obligation translate to technical implementation? Do those supercomputers get an optimized version of ROCm to fulfill said obligation?

[izacus]

Absolutely. You usually end up with software stack where NOTHING can be updated, most of the stuff is forked with custom patches and the learnings there aren't reusable elsewhere because the code is full of "// replace this with hardcoded constant 59843 because it prevents crash on HPC machine".

It's a good marketing metric, but probably contraproductive the AMDs longterm success in the field. They're spending engineering time building something they'll unlikely to be able to translate into other fields.

[p_l]

Vendor iterates until client gets an usable environment, even if that means 50 forks of different libraries with custom patches that in the end work only on that one system.