News Round-up: A busy week for the Arm server ecosystem

If you are following the server or HPC space closely, then you probably have seen the volume of Arm server news go well beyond 11 in the past week. Most of the news is coming straight out of our server ecosystem which has never been more active and robust.

Below you will find a round-up of all the Arm server news from the past seven days from ecosystem partners Cavium, Cray, HPE, IBM, Qualcomm, Red Hat and SUSE.  If you are a reporter or analyst and have any questions for Arm or need a contact for one of our ecosystem partners, please contact Allison PR

• New Arm Allinea studio provides access to Arm compilers and libraries as well as debug and optimization tools.
• Enables performance testing and tuning of scientific applications on Arm server SoCs, including the latest from Cavium and Qualcomm.

All major Linux distributions now support the Armv8-A architecture as Red Hat announces Arm server support for RH Enterprise Linux

• A major milestone for the Arm server ecosystem with the launch of Red Hat's single OS platform for the 64-bit Armv8-A architecture.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 is the first commercial release of its proven and secure enterprise-grade platform for Armv8-A.

Further expanding the OS platform choices for Arm servers, SUSE announced the beta of its SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 with support for the Armv8-A architecture

HPE announces its first HPC Arm-based platform, the HPE Apollo 70

• Dense, scalable platform built for memory-intensive HPC workloads with support for standard HPE provisioning, cluster management, and performance software.
• Delivers 33 percent more memory bandwidth than today's industry standard servers.
• Powered by Cavium's 64-bit Armv8-A ThunderX2 server processor

Cray adds Cavium ThunderX2 Arm-based processors to the Cray XC50 supercomputer platform

• A complete Arm-based supercomputer featuring a full software environment
• The GW4 Alliance, a collaborative alliance comprised of four of the UK's most research-intensive universities, is building its "Isambard" supercomputer on the Arm-based Cray XC50 platform
• Cray and Cavium also published some new benchmarks which you can read about in "Arm benchmarks show HPC ripe for processor shake-up" from The Next Platform

Arm processors part of two platforms which won HPC Wire awards at SC17

• Editor's choice for best HPC collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry): European R&D project Mont-Blanc investigates a new type of energy-efficient computer architecture for HPC, leveraging Arm processors
• Editor's choice for top new product or technology to watch: The Atos BullSequana X1310 with Arm processors

The University of Michigan selects Arm-based Cavium ThunderX SoCs for new Big Data computing cluster

• The $3.5 million computing cluster will enable U-M researchers to process massive amounts of data generated by remote sensors in distributed manufacturing environments, or by test fleets of automated and connected vehicles.

Latest IBM Spectrum LSF suites include support for Arm-based servers

• IBM Spectrum LSF version 10.2 manages end users' compute jobs on Arm-based clusters

Qualcomm announces first commercial shipment of its Arm-based Centriq 2400, the world's first 10nm server processor

• Read Arm's take on it from Drew Henry, SVP/GM of Arm Infrastructure Business Unit.
• Qualcomm's impressive performance and performance/watt/$$ benchmark results relative to comparable x86 processors can be found in Disrupting the datacenter: Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Processor (PDF)
• Real-world workloads from CloudFlare, who serves 10 percent of global internet requests, published data from their experience thus far.