• Another Step In Building The HPC Ecosystem For Arm

    April 16, 2018

    Many of us are impatient for Arm processors to take off in the datacenter in general and in HPC in particular. And ever so slowly, it looks like it is starting to happen.

    Every system buyer wants choice because choice increases competition, which lowers cost and mitigates against risk. But no organization, no matter how large, can afford to build its own software ecosystem. Even the hyperscalers like Google and Facebook, whole literally make money on the apps running on their vast infrastructure, rely heavily on the open source community, taking as much as they give back. So it is …

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  • Inference is the Hammer That Breaks the Datacenter

    February 15, 2018

    Two important changes to the datacenter are happening in the same year—one on the hardware side, another in software. And together, they create a force big enough to blow away the clouds, at least over the long haul.

    As we covered this year from a datacentric (and even supercomputing) point of view, 2018 is the time for Arm to shine. With a bevy of inroads to commercial markets at the high-end all the way down to the micro-device level, the architecture presents a genuine challenge to the processor establishment. And now, coupled with the biggest trend since cloud or …

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  • Cavium Is Truly A Contender With One-Two Arm Server Punch

    November 27, 2017

    It has been two years since chip maker Cavium rolled out its ThunderX Arm server processor roadmap and gave us the first glimpse of its second-generation ThunderX2 processors. A lot has changed in that time, and Cavium is now sitting in the cat-bird seat of the Arm server market at just the moment that it is merging with rival chipmaker Marvell.

    Timing is everything in this IT racket, and Cavium certainly has been fortunate in this regard.

    Thanks largely to Avago Technologies buying Broadcom in May 2015 for a stunning $37 billion and then at the end of 2016 losing …

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  • Red Hat Throws Its Full Support Behind Arm Server Chips

    November 14, 2017

    The gatekeeper to Arm in the datacenter has finally swung that gate wide open.

    Red Hat has always been a vocal support of Arm’s efforts to migrate its low-power architecture into the datacenter. The largest distributer of commercial Linux has spent years working with other tech vendors and industry groups like Linaro to build an ecosystem of hardware and software makers to support Arm systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) in servers and to build standards and policies for products that are powered by the chips. The company was a key player in the development of the Arm Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) specification …

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  • Arm Smooths the Path for Porting HPC Apps

    November 8, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

    One of the arguments Intel officials and others have made against Arm’s push to get its silicon designs into the datacenter has been the burden it would mean for enterprises and organizations in the HPC field that would have to modify application codes to get their software to run on the Arm architecture.

    For HPC organizations, that would mean moving the applications from the Intel-based and IBM systems that have dominated the space for years, a time-consuming and possibly costly process.

    Arm officials over the years have acknowledged the challenge, but have noted their infrastructure’s embrace of open-source software and …

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  • Qualcomm Builds Momentum For Centriq ARM Server Chip

    October 25, 2017

    The talk about ARM-based servers pushing their way into the datacenter has been going for almost a decade now, during which time we have seen companies like Samsung drop their interest before they really got going on it and others like AMD getting an ARM-based chip out but then turning their attention to other initiatives.

    We have also seen vendors like Cavium and Applied Micro get chips to market with some levels of adoption. Top system OEMs like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Cray are using these chips to various degrees in commercially available or test servers. And the …

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  • ARM Servers: Qualcomm Is Now A Contender

    August 23, 2017

    Many have tried to wrench the door of the datacenter open with ARM processors, but Qualcomm, which knows a thing or two about creating and selling chips for smartphones and other client devices, has perhaps the best chance of actually selling ARM chips in volume inside of servers.

    The combination of a rich and eager target market with a good product design tailored for that market and enough financial strength and stability to ensure many generations of development are what are necessary to break into the datacenter, and the “Falkor” cores that were unveiled this week at Hot Chips were …

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  • Momentum is Building for ARM in HPC

    June 30, 2017 Jonathan Beard, Roxana Rusitoru

    2011 marked ARM’s first step into the world of HPC with the European Mont-Blanc project. The premise was simple: leverage the energy efficiency of ARM-based mobile designs for high performance computing applications.

    Unfortunately, making the leap from the mobile market to HPC was not an easy feat. Long time players in this space, such as Intel and IBM, hold home field advantage: that of legacy software. HPC-optimized libraries, compilers and applications were already present for these platforms. This was not, however, the case for ARM. Early adopters had to start, largely from scratch, porting and building an ecosystem with a …

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  • Cray CTO On The Cambrian Compute Explosion

    June 19, 2017

    What goes around comes around. After fighting so hard to drive volume economics in the HPC arena with relatively inexpensive X86 clusters in the past twenty years, those economies of scale are running out of gas. That is why we are seeing an explosion in the diversity of compute, not just on the processor, but in adjunct computing elements that make a processor look smarter than it really is.

    The desire of system architects to try everything because it is fun has to be counterbalanced by a desire to make systems that can be manufactured at a price that is …

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  • Red Hat Is The Gatekeeper For ARM In The Datacenter

    May 5, 2017

    If any new hardware technology is going to get traction in the datacenter, it has to have the software behind it. And as the dominant supplier of commercial Linux, Red Hat’s support of ARM-based servers gives the upstart chip makers like Applied Micro, Cavium, and Qualcomm the leverage to help pry the glasshouse doors open and get a slice of the server and storage business that is so utterly dominated by Intel’s Xeon processors today.

    It is now or never for ARM in the datacenter, and that means Red Hat has to go all the way and not just support …

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