Join us at ISC 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany as ARM hosts its “Going ARM” Workshop on Thursday, June 22 from 09:00-13:00. This workshop is all about sharing experiences and knowledge. Attendees will gain from the first-hand knowledge of experienced scientific application programmers building codes for the ARM platform, including topics such as: optimizing for 64-bit ARM, memory systems, scalability and vectorization.
The workshop brings together HPC software and hardware engineers, scientists, tool developers, a academic and industry partners into a single venue to share their experiences and successes. It is a great event for ARM partners and users to improve their understanding of the growing ARM HPC ecosystem and how it can enable successful HPC deployments in 2017 and beyond.
With a well-established ecosystem, primarily focused around mobile and embedded platforms, ARM has been expanding in recent years towards the HPC and server markets. Silicon (Cavium, Qualcomm, Fujitsu, Mellanox), systems (Lenovo, Cray, Atos Bull) and software (Allinea, Rogue Wave) HPC vendors have been adding their expertise to ARM’s ecosystem, enabling the first ARM HPC machines (Isambard, Post-K computer). The GoingARM workshop provides a place for all those who work on and use the benefits of ARM-based technology to share experiences and for all of those interested, to learn.
One of the strengths of adopting the ARM architecture is that it gives the freedom of a unified instruction set, while enabling vendors to be creative with their underlying optimized micro-architectural implementations, in addition to system technologies, from the System-on-Chip (SoC) level and beyond. This creativity drives choice and competition while creating a better market for the end software users and maintaining software compatibility across platforms. This ability to create a vibrant competitive HPC/server marketplace is something quite different from other instruction sets within the same market. Having a choice of several micro-architectures from different companies targeted at potentially different workloads can be a huge help, however, from a software perspective it is critical that end-users have a consistent software narrative that can apply to multi-system testing. Ensuring the availability of high quality tools is a top priority for ARM, whether they be open source or tools provided by commercial entities.
As a burgeoning market, to ensure that high quality tools are being developed, ARM has a suite of software to help users get the best performance out of their chosen systems, both today and as they prepare for chips with future options such as Scalable Vector Extentions (SVE). As part of the workshop, ARM will discuss its currently available software tools, including compilers and libraries. Attendees will also have a presentation by Allinea on their expanded offerings for ARM in HPC.
An ecosystem is nothing without participants at all levels. For computing, that begins with the chip manufacturers. One of the many strong participants within the ARM HPC ecosystem is Cavium. Cavium has been leading the ARM server market with many firsts – including the first production deployment of dual socket ARMv8 silicon with ThunderX. Cavium has also collaborated with leading software vendors to accelerate the HPC software ecosystem and is installed today in many of the elite HPC Labs and Research institutions worldwide. At GoingARM Cavium will provide product and roadmap updates on its ThunderX2 Family of ARM-based processors as well as additional ecosystem developments in HPC.
GoingARM is a venue first and foremost for HPC (and related) software developers for the ARM platform. Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has a long history with the ARM architecture, starting with the first Mont Blanc prototype clusters. Filippo Mantovani will be presenting BSC’s experience porting applications to ARM with an emphasis on scalability, efficiency and performance. University of Michigan (UofM) has a long relationship with ARM platforms. Their latest project centers around maximizing performance for sparse and dense matrix operations found in popular genomics and analytics applications for the ARM SVE instruction set. Jonathan Beaumont, the graduate student primarily responsible for this work, will be presenting his perspective, porting experience, and some performance results.
The first sign of a growing platform for high performance computing is the emergence of real systems. 2016 saw the installation of several test machines, while 2017 will bring the first large scale ARM HPC installations. As part of a collaborative effort, the UK’s Great Western-4 alliance of the Universities of Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter, along with the Met Office and Cray, have announced what will be the world’s first, large-scale production ARM machine, Isambard. The person that led the effort to create Isambard, Prof Simon McIntosh-Smith, will be presenting some architectural details and some early results from their software porting efforts. At ISC 2016 (Frankfurt, Germany), RIKEN announced that as part of the FLAGSHIP2020 project, Fujitsu would be producing the processors for their Post-K machine based on the ARMv8 64-bit architecture as the successor of Japan’s current petascale system, the K computer. GoingARM attendees will get a more detailed look at the project and of research and development work for ARM SVE presented by Mitsuhisa Sato, Deputy Project Leader (FLAGSHIP2020, RIKEN AICS, Japan).
Extending our on-going series of HPC User Group workshops at SC events, GoingARM at ISC 2017 will continue to ensure that ARM partners, users, and perspective users have a place to come learn and share experiences with the ARM HPC ecosystem to foster a robust and growing environment for the future.
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