Today NVIDIA announced its support for Arm CPUs, providing the high performance computing industry a new path to build extremely energy-efficient, AI-enabled exascale supercomputers.
NVIDIA is making available to the Arm ecosystem its full stack of AI and HPC software — which accelerates more than 600 HPC applications and all AI frameworks — by year’s end. The stack includes all NVIDIA CUDA-X AI and HPC libraries, GPU-accelerated AI frameworks and software development tools such as PGI compilers with OpenACC support and profilers.
Once stack optimization is complete, NVIDIA will accelerate all major CPU architectures, including x86, POWER and Arm.
Supercomputers are the essential instruments of scientific discovery, and achieving exascale supercomputing will dramatically expand the frontier of human knowledge,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “As traditional compute scaling ends, power will limit all supercomputers. The combination of NVIDIA’s CUDA-accelerated computing and Arm’s energy-efficient CPU architecture will give the HPC community a boost to exascale.”
According to the GREEN500 list released today, NVIDIA powers 22 of the world’s 25 most energy-efficient supercomputers.
Key factors making this possible are: the ability of NVIDIA GPU-powered supercomputers to offload heavy processing jobs to more energy-efficient parallel processing CUDA GPUs; NVIDIA’s collaboration with Mellanox to optimize processing across entire supercomputing clusters; and NVIDIA’s invention of SXM 3D-packaging and NVIDIA NVLink interconnect technology, which allows for extremely dense scale-up nodes.
We have been a pioneer in using NVIDIA GPUs on large-scale supercomputers for the last decade, including Japan’s most powerful ABCI supercomputer,” said Satoshi Matsuoka from Riken in Japan. “At Riken R-CCS, we are currently developing the next-generation, Arm-based, exascale Fugaku supercomputer and are thrilled to hear that NVIDIA’s GPU acceleration platform will soon be available for Arm-based systems.”
NVIDIA’s support for Arm-based HPC systems builds on more than 10 years of collaboration. NVIDIA uses Arm for several of its system on a chip products available for portable gaming, autonomous vehicles, robotics and embedded AI computing.
World leaders of the HPC industry and Arm ecosystem, including supercomputing centers and systems providers and system on a chip manufacturers, have voiced their support.
Both NVIDIA and Arm leverage technologies that offer high performance computing customers greater levels of energy efficiency,” said Bill Mannel from HPE. “NVIDIA’s support for Arm complements our latest developments on the HPE Apollo 70, an Arm-based, purpose-built HPC system, and now, NVIDIA GPU-enabled. With the HPE Apollo 70 supporting a 2U GPU tray and multiple energy-efficient cooling options, we can further help the HPC industry address increasingly unsustainable levels of power consumption.”
