ARM Community: Sunrise of Energy Efficient High Performance Computing at SC12 - ARM Community

Last year I wrote a blog about the “Dawn of Energy Efficient High Performance Computing at SC11” where ARM supported a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) on an initiative called EEHPC.com. This year we go across the country from the Seattle dawn SC11 to the Utah sunrise SC12. The sunrise period marks an exciting time for ARM as more technology becomes available. These technologies enable companies to create innovative energy-efficient products for new markets. Today we announce the first official ARM booth at a Supercomputing Conference in Salt Lake City.

THE DAWN (last year)

We started with a BoF which discussed “A new, open community website for Energy Efficient HPC based on embedded processors” with support from multiple organizations, namely University of Bristol, ARM, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Calxeda, and NVIDIA. You can take a look at the presentations here.

In addition, last year ARM released a new architecture called ARMv8 which included AArch64 (64-bit Instruction Set Architecture). AppliedMicro announced the first product called X-Gene^TM which is an implementation of the ARMv8 architecture. New energy-efficient technologies were released last year, for instance the big.LITTLE^TM technology. This technology is about balancing performance, power and area. All these announcements combined with the latest intelligent networking and storage products provided the foundation blocks to design a new Exascale HPC using ARM^© processors.

THE SUNRISE (today)

Following the announcement of ARMv8, Cavium also became a 64-bit licensee. ARM introduced the Cortex ™-A53 and Cortex-A57 at the ARM Techcon – these processors are the first 64-bit IP coming from ARM. Their design pushes the boundaries of efficiency and performance while having industry leading constrains on area and power consumption. These announcements have shifted the possibility of an ARM based Exascale HPC from design to build because Exascale is all about power-efficiency.


To support this shift we have two major activities occurring at SC12. The first is helping with a BoF describing the latest status of EEHPC.com and the second activity is the announcement of the first official ARM booth at a Supercomputing Conference.


This BoF will look at the EEHPC report card one year later, review what progress has been made, and identify where there are still challenges to be met. It will be supported by Fujitsu, University of Bristol, MIT, Virginia Tech / Green 500, NVIDIA, Oracle, Adapteva, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.


The booth will have people from ARM who can help answer questions around HPC and ARM. We will be showing a bigger version of the image shown above at the booth.

We will also demonstrate three technology areas - entry, edge and standard.

• Entry - is an example of a low cost way to get hold of ARM Technology
• Edge - demonstrates a HPC molecular workload running on a CPU+GPGPU combination
• Standard - shows a real 5U ARM-based system

This is an exciting time for ARM and I would like encourage everyone attending SC12 in Utah to go to BoF on Energy Efficient High Performance Computing being co-hosted by University of Bristol and MIT in room 155-C at 5:30 PM on Tuesday November 13th. I would also like to invite everyone to visit the ARM Booth #122.

I hope to see you in Salt Lake City either at the ARM booth or at the BoF.

INTERESTING URLs

• Penguin Joins Microserver ARMs Race
• AMD unveils plans for 64-bit ARM processors for servers
• Barcelona Supercomputer ARMed For Assault on World’s Fastest Machines
• Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem
• Energy-efficient HPC is Heating Up
• Calxeda Unveils ARM-Based Server-on-a-Chip
• ARM Announces New HPC IP to Address Demand for Energy-Efficient ‘Many-core’ Solutions for the Enterprise Market
• Many many more …

Andrew N. Sloss, Consultant Engineer, ARM, He is interested in future software technologies and trends. In particular, Andrew looks at how software can make use of low power devices in new innovating ways. Andrew is an author, Fellow of the British Computer Society, and currently holds the chair of the ARM Bindings Sub Team for UEFI.