Interview: Brent Gorda on his New Role as Head of ARM HPC

Former Whamcloud CEO Brent Gorda has a new role as Senior Director for the HPC business at Arm. We caught up with Brent to learn more about the company’s plans to grow their business in the Datacenter, HPC space, and on to Exascale. “Arm partners ship over 20 billion cores a year(!) and our company is well-known for being the core IP in many designs at the edge. The trend toward the datacenter with Arm is clear, it’s an opportunity for the HPC market to take advantage of the considerable boost in performance via SVE and the Arm roadmap.”

Celebrating 20 Years of the OpenMP API

“The first version of the OpenMP application programming interface (API) was published in October 1997. In the 20 years since then, the OpenMP API and the slightly older MPI have become the two stable programming models that high-performance parallel codes rely on. MPI handles the message passing aspects and allows code to scale out to significant numbers of nodes, while the OpenMP API allows programmers to write portable code to exploit the multiple cores and accelerators in modern machines.”

Cavium ThunderX2 Processor goes GA for HPC and Beyond

Today Cavium announced the General Availability of ThunderX2, Cavium’s second generation of Armv8-A SoC processors. “Integrating ThunderX2 into the HPE Apollo 70 Servers is another example of HPE’s leadership in driving innovation and superior technical solutions into the HPC server market. The ThunderX2 processor provides excellent compute and memory performance that is critical for our HPE Apollo 70 customers and the applications they depend on.”

New Arm-based Workstation Opens the Doors for HPC Developers

Today GIGABYTE Technology announced the availability of ThunderXStation: the industry’s first 64-bit Armv8 workstation platform based on Cavium’s flagship ThunderX2 processor. “ThunderXStation is an ideal platform for Arm software developers across networking, embedded, mobile, and IoT verticals. We are delighted to be working closely with GIGABYTE on this, and we look forward to supporting them on a number of innovative new platforms.”

Cavium Joins OpenCAPI for Next-gen Platforms

Today Cavium announced it is collaborating with IBM for next generation platforms by joining OpenCAPI, an initiative founded by IBM, Google, AMD and others. OpenCAPI provides high-bandwidth, low latency interface optimized to connect accelerators, IO devices and memory to CPUs. With this announcement Cavium plans to bring its leadership in server IO and security offloads to next generation platforms that support the OpenCAPI interface. “We are excited to be a part of the OpenCAPI consortium. As our partnership with IBM continues to grow, we see more synergies in high speed communication and Artificial Intelligence applications.” said Syed Ali, founder and CEO of Cavium. “We look forward to working with IBM to enable exponential performance gains for these applications.”

Cavium Showcases ThunderX2 Arm-based Server Platforms for HPC

At SC17 in Denver, Cavium showcased a wide variety of ThunderX2 Arm-based server platforms for high performance computing. “ThunderX2 server SoC integrates fully out-of-order, high-performance custom cores supporting single and dual-socket configurations. It is optimized to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as the Arm Server Base System Architecture and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements standards.”

Cavium ThunderX Cluster to Crunch Big Data at University of Michigan

Today Cavium announced a new partnership that will position the University of Michigan as a leader in data-intensive scientific research by creating a powerful Big Data computing cluster using dual socket servers powered by Cavium’s ThunderX ARMv8-A workload optimized processors. The cluster consists of 40 servers each containing 96 ARMv8 cores and 512 GB of RAM per server. 

Cavium Joins the OpenMP Effort for ThunderX2 Processor

Today the OpenMP ARB organization announced that Cavium has joined as a new member. “Cavium’s membership in the OpenMP ARB further highlights our strong belief in industry’s demand for parallel computing and the significance of the ARM Architecture,” said Avinash Sodani, Distinguished Engineer at Cavium. “Cavium’s strong product portfolio includes ThunderX2, a compelling server-class, multi-core ARMv8 CPU suited for the most demanding compute workloads. We look forward to working with other OpenMP members in furthering OpenMP standards to meet the challenges of the Exascale era.”

Red Hat Showcases ThunderX 2 Development Platform for HPC

In this video, Jon Masters from Red Hat describes the company’s multi-architecture solutions that were on display at ISC 2017. “Developing new and adapting existing highly scalable applications to take advantage of the new technological advances across multiple deployment domains is the greatest challenge facing HPC sites. This is where the operating system can provide a unified interface to the underlying hardware and interconnects and serve as a foundation for modular and standardized application stacks that take advantage of enhanced system capabilities.”

HPC Vendors showcase plans for ARM products

Are you ready? ARM-based HPC systems will be available by the end of 2017. At ISC 2017, Penguin Computing and Bull both announced that they will deliver products tailored for the HPC industry. Both companies systems will feature Cavium’s ARMv8-based ThunderX2 platform.