Video: State of ARM-based HPC

In this video, Paul Isaacs from Linaro presents: State of ARM-based HPC. “This talk provides an overview of applications and infrastructure services successfully ported to Aarch64 and benefiting from scale. “With its debut on the TOP500, the 125,000-core Astra supercomputer at New Mexico’s Sandia Labs uses Cavium ThunderX2 chips to mark Arm’s entry into the petascale world. In Japan, the Fujitsu A64FX Arm-based CPU in the pending Fugaku supercomputer has been optimized to achieve high-level, real-world application performance, anticipating up to one hundred times the application execution performance of the K computer.”

Arm HPC User Group to Host First Annual Meeting in Portugal

Arm’s HPC User Group (A-HUG) is transitioning to a fully-fledged community-led organization to better support the Arm ecosystem. The first annual meeting of the community-lead A-HUG will be held March 12-13 in Porto, Portugal. “The A-HUG event will include a hands-on training event and excellent talks covering the broad landscape of early systems & experience, near-term expectations for new hardware, and long term trends for architectures.”

The Mont-Blanc project: Updates from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Filippo Mantovani from BSC gave this talk at the GoingARM workshop at SC17. “Since 2011, Mont-Blanc has pushed the adoption of Arm technology in High Performance Computing, deploying Arm-based prototypes, enhancing system software ecosystem and projecting performance of current systems for developing new, more powerful and less power hungry HPC computing platforms based on Arm SoC. In this talk, Filippo introduces the last Mont-Blanc system, called Dibona, designed and integrated by the coordinator and industrial partner of the project, Bull/ATOS.”

Video: A Closer Look at the Atos Dibona Prototype for ARM-based HPC

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Pascale Bruner from Atos describes the company’s innovative ARM-HPC technologies developed as part of the Mont-Blanc Project. “Atos will showcase our Dibona prototype for ARM-based HPC. Named after the Dibona peak in the French Alps, the new prototype is part of the Phase 3 of Mont-Blanc and is based on 64 bit ThunderX2 processors from Cavium, relying on the ARM v8 instruction set.”

Mont-Blanc to Sponsor UPC Team at ISC 2018 Student Cluster Competition

The Mont-Blanc Project will once again sponsor a team at the upcoming ISC 2018 Student Cluster Competition. The sponsored team from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya / Barcelona Tech (UPC) will compete for the fourth time at ISC 2018, which takes place June 24– 28 in Frankfurt, Germany. “I am always impressed by the technical prowess exhibited by these young teams: the way they are turning our lessons into applied knowledge, through live benchmarking and on the fly troubleshooting is a great process and it triggers a positive loop in all of us.”

Radio Free HPC Looks at Europe’s Push for Leadership in Global HPC

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at some the top High Performance Computing stories from this week. First up, we look at Europe’s effort to lead HPC in the next decade. After that, we look at why small companies like Scalable Informatics have such a hard time surviving in the HPC marketplace.

Cray to Develop ARM-based Isambard Supercomputer for UK Met Office

“This is an exciting time in high performance computing,” said Prof Simon McIntosh-Smith, leader of the project and Professor of High Performance Computing at the University of Bristol. “Scientists have a growing choice of potential computer architectures to choose from, including new 64-bit ARM CPUs, graphics processors, and many-core CPUs from Intel. Choosing the best architecture for an application can be a difficult task, so the new Isambard GW4 Tier 2 HPC service aims to provide access to a wide range of the most promising emerging architectures, all using the same software stack.”

SC16 Best Paper Finalist Looks at Mont-Blanc Project

Now that ARM has been acquired, the big question is how much the Softbank investment firm will invest in bolstering their chips for HPC. Meanwhile, ARM continues to gain traction as evidenced by
today’s announcement that a paper on the ARM-based Mont-Blanc Project has been selected as a Best Paper Finalist for SC16. Entitled “The Mont-Blanc prototype: An Alternative Approach for HPC Systems,” the paper was written by Nikola Rajovic, a BSC researcher involved in the Mont-Blanc project since its beginnings.