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Just like China with their Longsoon processors
“The details of the Aum HPC processor came to light this week, and could not have come at a better time as we are just a tad bit sick of writing about AI and it is pretty quiet out there in IT Land despite this being the week before the International Super Computing conference in Frankfort Hamburg. (I prefer hamburgers to frankfurters anyway. . . but like both, of course.) The Aum HPC processor was developed under the auspices of the National Supercomputing Mission of the Indian government, and the presentation that we have seen was put together by Sanjay Wandhekar, senior director of the HoD HPC Technologies Group at C-DAC.
The mission brings together the Indian Institute of Science, the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and C-DAC to bring HPC independence, from the processor all the way up to complete systems and software, to the government of India and the organizations that need HPC processing and, presumably, Indian industry giants who may also not want to be dependent on outside sources of silicon, systems, and software for their HPC and AI workloads. This is not only a technology effort, but also a one relating to manufacturing as well as datacenter design with an emphasis on liquid cooling for the most powerful – and we presume exascale – machinery. The effort also includes developing supercomputing applications “of national interest” and cultivating the programming and system administration expertise necessary to create those applications, maintain them, and run them in production.
In addition to having a supply chain for HPC parts and systems that is immune from possible import into India, the Indian government is also keen on knowing, without a doubt, that there are no security backdoors in the hardware or software it uses to deploy HPC and AI applications. Given that India is a nuclear power that shares a border with China and is but a stone’s throw away from Russia, it is not hard to understand why India is embracing the Arm architecture and doing a custom processor. And it will not be surprising when Pakistan, which also shares a border with India and which has about the same number of nuclear weapons as India, does a custom processor, too. Perhaps it will be based on RISC-V?
The Aum HPC processor is not restricted to the HPC market, and we can expect for variants of it to be used in the AI and generic cloud computing spaces as well. The chip is expected to be available in 2024, and will be initially deployed in a pilot HPC system with in excess of 1 petaflops of performance (presumably this is peak theoretical performance). After that, the Indian government is looking to “be ready with exascale system design and subsystems” based on the Aum CPU. (By the way, we don’t think the word “Aum” has anything to do with “Arm,” but is an alternative spelling for “Om,” which is a romanization of an ancient Sanskrit word that is a sacred mantra in the Hindu faith.)
To create the Aum processor, the techies at C-DAC studied the A64FX processor and Fugaku system at RIKEN as well as its predecessor Sparc64-VIIIfx processor and K supercomputer, and saw what we all see in the HPCG benchmark data since it first was rekeased. And that is: Getting a better ratio of memory bandwidth to floating point operations per second actually drives real-world application performance. In fact, the K system has a bytes/flops ratio of 0.5 and delivered 5.2 percent of peak HPL performance on the HPCG test, compared to a 0.38 bytes/flops ratio and a 3 percent of peak rating for Fugaku. (In other words, performance moved in the wrong direction with the generational leap at RIKEN.) So C-DAC decided to try to push up the memory bandwidth per flops ratio to above 0.5. In addition, C-DAC wanted to stay away from GPU and other accelerators and relatively small vectors that are easier to optimize as well as provide a mix of HBM and DDR main memories and plenty of PCI-Express I/O lanes with CXL coherency support.”
Source: https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/05/17/india-declares-cpu-independence-with-aum-hpc-processor/
“The details of the Aum HPC processor came to light this week, and could not have come at a better time as we are just a tad bit sick of writing about AI and it is pretty quiet out there in IT Land despite this being the week before the International Super Computing conference in Frankfort Hamburg. (I prefer hamburgers to frankfurters anyway. . . but like both, of course.) The Aum HPC processor was developed under the auspices of the National Supercomputing Mission of the Indian government, and the presentation that we have seen was put together by Sanjay Wandhekar, senior director of the HoD HPC Technologies Group at C-DAC.
The mission brings together the Indian Institute of Science, the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and C-DAC to bring HPC independence, from the processor all the way up to complete systems and software, to the government of India and the organizations that need HPC processing and, presumably, Indian industry giants who may also not want to be dependent on outside sources of silicon, systems, and software for their HPC and AI workloads. This is not only a technology effort, but also a one relating to manufacturing as well as datacenter design with an emphasis on liquid cooling for the most powerful – and we presume exascale – machinery. The effort also includes developing supercomputing applications “of national interest” and cultivating the programming and system administration expertise necessary to create those applications, maintain them, and run them in production.
In addition to having a supply chain for HPC parts and systems that is immune from possible import into India, the Indian government is also keen on knowing, without a doubt, that there are no security backdoors in the hardware or software it uses to deploy HPC and AI applications. Given that India is a nuclear power that shares a border with China and is but a stone’s throw away from Russia, it is not hard to understand why India is embracing the Arm architecture and doing a custom processor. And it will not be surprising when Pakistan, which also shares a border with India and which has about the same number of nuclear weapons as India, does a custom processor, too. Perhaps it will be based on RISC-V?
The Aum HPC processor is not restricted to the HPC market, and we can expect for variants of it to be used in the AI and generic cloud computing spaces as well. The chip is expected to be available in 2024, and will be initially deployed in a pilot HPC system with in excess of 1 petaflops of performance (presumably this is peak theoretical performance). After that, the Indian government is looking to “be ready with exascale system design and subsystems” based on the Aum CPU. (By the way, we don’t think the word “Aum” has anything to do with “Arm,” but is an alternative spelling for “Om,” which is a romanization of an ancient Sanskrit word that is a sacred mantra in the Hindu faith.)
To create the Aum processor, the techies at C-DAC studied the A64FX processor and Fugaku system at RIKEN as well as its predecessor Sparc64-VIIIfx processor and K supercomputer, and saw what we all see in the HPCG benchmark data since it first was rekeased. And that is: Getting a better ratio of memory bandwidth to floating point operations per second actually drives real-world application performance. In fact, the K system has a bytes/flops ratio of 0.5 and delivered 5.2 percent of peak HPL performance on the HPCG test, compared to a 0.38 bytes/flops ratio and a 3 percent of peak rating for Fugaku. (In other words, performance moved in the wrong direction with the generational leap at RIKEN.) So C-DAC decided to try to push up the memory bandwidth per flops ratio to above 0.5. In addition, C-DAC wanted to stay away from GPU and other accelerators and relatively small vectors that are easier to optimize as well as provide a mix of HBM and DDR main memories and plenty of PCI-Express I/O lanes with CXL coherency support.”
Source: https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/05/17/india-declares-cpu-independence-with-aum-hpc-processor/
