The ISC16 event occurred last week in Frankfurt, Germany. ISC stands for International Super-computing and while ARM is known for its energy-efficient, mobile CPU cores, we are beginning to make some waves in the arena of the world’s largest computers.
To kick off the week, our partner Fujitsu unveiled their plan for the next generation “Post-K” supercomputer to be based on ARMv8-A technology. It turns out ARM Research has been working hard for several years on a number of technical advantages that will give ARM partners an edge in the HPC market and Fujitsu has taken note. At ISC16, both Fujitsu and RIKEN, the user of Japan’s fastest and current “K” super-computer, presented their plans to collaborate on the ARM-based Post-K supercomputer. The significance of this announcement can’t be overstated as this strategic project is seen as Japan’s stepping stone to the Exascale tier of super-computing. Exascale requires roughly 10x the computing power of today’s fastest computers, yet must function within similar power envelopes. It is a lofty goal.
More will be divulged by ARM on its HPC technology at HotChips this August, but in the meantime, here are a few links to recent articles covering the Fujitsu announcement and others relating to ARM in HPC. The Next Platform article does a particularly good job of highlighting why Fujitsu and RIKEN see value in the ARMv8-A architecture and ARM server ecosystem:
The last two articles linked above are interesting in they seem to imply that ARM is delving in HPC based on “mobile chips”. This certainly isn’t the case. ARM and its partners are taking advantage of the architectural flexibility the ARM business model provides them. Fujitsu and others are designing CPU’s from the ground up with HPC codes and end-user super-computer applications fully in mind, while still benefit from the energy-efficiency benefits of the ARMv8-A architecture. As noted in the slide shown above, Fujitsu’s own “POST-K” microarchitecture and their collaboration with RIKEN and ARM is a great example of this. We expect more to come from other ARM partners in the future, so stay tuned.