With deployments of Arm-based servers for HPC now on the near horizon, ISC17 in Frankfurt was a prime opportunity for partners and end-users to begin talking more openly about their plans and intentions. While software ecosystem enablement has been, and continues to be, one of the main topics of conversation, with Arm announcing BETA access to its first ever commercial Fortran compiler, there was some serious buzz around the initial showing of Cavium’s ThunderX2 hardware on the ISC Expo floor. Companies such as HPE, ATOS-Bull, Gigabyte, and Penguin were showing off various prototypes and it was standing-room only in the Arm ecosystem BOF sessions lead by HPE, Arm, and others during the week. Numerous end-users such as Sandia and Bristol-GW4 outlined plans and commented on early looks at hardware.
An ATOS-Bull prototype blade in the Mont Blanc booth at ISC17
With the blur of discussions and topics covered by Arm and partners, I want to highlight two new key items here. Both are important to the overall Arm ecosystem for HPC and both were launched last week at the ISC event.
First off, I’d like to introduce the new Arm HPC Users Group community site, arm-hpc.gitlab.io. This public site augments Arm’s existing, corporate owned and operated (developer.arm.com/hpc) site for HPC software ecosystem news. It enhances collaboration by allowing the full Arm community to participate in the sharing of their insights and work, the hosting of events, and the documenting of their deployments and porting efforts on Arm-based servers. While Arm will continue to push the commercial and open-source software needle ever higher, we understand the importance of a community driven ecosystem. With the next generation HPC SoCs from Cavium arriving in 2017, now is a great time to make that collaboration happen. Please visit the site, join the mailing list, and get rolling.
Secondly, on a closely related topic, is the new HPC Tools Grant program. This program allows HPC researchers who are working on HPC evaluation clusters, or software ecosystem partners porting their codes to Arm, to leverage a cost-free license for the latest and greatest Arm HPC tools. This includes the optimized HPC compilers, math libraries and Allinea Forge analysis and debugger tools. While Arm production deployments are in the planning stages, we recognize the advantage of have fully ported and optimized codes in place for the best and most efficient results.
Finally, I’d like to highlight a couple of key news items that came across the wire over the last week or two, in conjunction with ISC, which folks might have missed.
With a broad set of partners all working to enable heterogeneous data centers that include Arm server technology, keep an eye out for the new big HPC show, SC17 in November, where ever larger steps will be taken in support of Arm in the realm of supercomputers.