Showing posts with label ARM developers. Show all posts
Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology will be used in the Post-K supercomputer being built by Fujitsu.
ARM has upped the supercomputer ante against rivals IBM, Intel and Nvidia with the announcement of Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology.
ARM has upped the supercomputer ante against rivals IBM, Intel and Nvidia with the announcement of Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology.
Developed
for the ARMv8-A architecture, the SVE technology is already set to be used for
the Post-K supercomputer being built by Fujitsu for the RIKEN Advanced Institute
for Computational Science in Japan.
Unveiled
at the Hot Chips conference in the US, the technology supports vectors from
128-bit to 2048-bit. Shifting the vector calculation problem from software to
hardware, SVE technology will be a scalable extension to the ARM instruction
set.
Vector
processors drove early supercomputers, but were then replaced by less expensive
IBM RISC chips in the early 1990s. In today’s high-performance servers x86
processors are used, but this could be set to shift with the industry seeing a
renewed reliance on vector processing.
The
move my ARM to introduce this alternative chip architecture is a sign of the
company’s plans to move deeper into the server, data centre and
high-performance computing (HPC) space while offering something different to
rivals.
The
new chip design could soon be running the world’s most powerful supercomputer
if the plans for the Post-K supercomputer comes to fruition. Fujitsu chose ARM
in July 2016 for the supercomputer, shifting from the 2GHz Sun Sparc64 cores
used in the K supercomputer. If the build goes smoothly, the new supercomputer
could be capable of 1,000 petaflops.
The
announcement at Hot Chips follows the recent acquisition of the UK chip maker
by Japanese company SoftBank. With the price set at $32 billion, the acquisition
hopes to sharpen ARM’s focus in the server and internet of things space.
ARM microchips are used by millions of people to connect everyday
devices and appliances over the internet. Arm’s designs lie at the heart
of almost every smartphone sold today. Many cheaper phones use its
off-the-shelf chips but for more sophisticated and expensive handsets,
chipmakers often customise Arm’s technology to produce more distinctive
features. With Intel backing out of the mobile processor market earlier
this year to focus on servers, modems and the “internet of things”,
there are few viable alternatives to Arm.
Television
Many
modern televisions enable users to watch programmes and films through apps such
as Netflix, which are powered by ARM-based processors. The firm’s technology is
also frequently used in remote controls and set-top boxes.
Smartphones
and tablets
ARM
technology helps power both smartphones and iPads. E-readers, such as Kindles,
and digital cameras also use the products.
Home
‘smart’ systems
Smart
household appliances often use ARM-based chips to give homeowners greater
control over their functions – and costs. This can include internet-connected
thermostats, allowing users to control their heating via their smartphone,
fridges that alert users when they have run out of groceries, and electricity
metres that can help save money on energy bills.
Wearable
gadgets
Fitness
trackers and smart watches are becoming increasingly popular with consumers.
These gadgets have relied on ARM technology for years.
Internal
car systems
ARM-based
chips are frequently used in cars to show drivers maps, offer voice recognition
and to control music. They are also being used in prototypes for self-driving
cars to power systems that trigger automatic electronic braking, for example.
The technology could also be used in smart roads warning drivers about spots of
black ice ahead.
Drones
Drones
are becoming increasingly popular, be it families flying them in the park or
photographers capturing aerial shots. They rely on tiny computers called
microcontrollers and ARM estimates that a quarter of the chips made last year
used its technology.
Energy
efficient cities
Street
lamps that dim themselves and parking meters that detect when spaces are empty
are examples of sensors being used by cities to cut costs and help inhabitants.
ARM believes this sector holds great potential for its business.
Several
months ago we had pre-release benchmarks of the Cavium ThunderX. The company
promptly contacted us and wanted to show what its hardware can do. Those
benchmarks were done on an older OS with older software. Over the past few
weeks we have been working with both the single and dual socket (48 core and 96
core) variants of the Cavium ThunderX part and what struck us is how fast the
software side is maturing in key areas. We will have more in-depth benchmarks
of the platforms running real world workloads soon.
Prior
to the release of the Cavium ThunderX most 64-bit ARM development, even for
server applications, has been done on low price ARM development boards. There
the typical core and memory count is both fixed and low. Networking is often
provided by a USB to Ethernet adapter. This is a scene of typical ARM
development hardware to date at many Silicon Valley startups:
While that is great for IoT development, the Cavium ThunderX platform is completely different. There are both single and dual processor configurations scaling up to 96 64-bit ARM cores. Memory capacities can scale into the TB range, or about 1000x a typical IoT development board. Networking provided on our test platforms is 80Gbps for our single processor system and 160Gbps on our dual processor system. Onboard storage can support more than a dozen SSDs or hard drives. Here is what our dual Cavium ThunderX 96 core test platform (a Gigabyte R270-T61) looks like inside:
The
bottom line is, if you are developing for ARM in the data center, you need to
get a Cavium ThunderX platform as it is the best data center ARM platform
generally available today. In the remainder of this article, we are going to
show how some benchmarks around the evolving software and development
ecosystems. These benchmarks will show how the Cavium ThunderX is a competitive
server platform. With a few weeks of working with the hardware/ software, and
given the fact we manage both lab and production servers with Ubuntu, we are
going to share some anecdotal experiences as well.
The
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Update
We
originally received our single Cavium ThunderX 48 core system Gigabyte R120-T30
that we reviewed here. It had Ubuntu 14.04 LTS pre-installed from Cavium. After
poking around with the machine running in our data center, there were a few
nuances to the setup and ARM platforms:
- - Using
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS required quite a bit of patching to get great performance
- - Trying
to pull working software via “apt-get install” if it resided in universe
did not always work. Sometimes packages were just not present. Those that
did install were not optimized.
- - As Cavium pointed out, using newer gcc versions and building applications from the latest source was often the way to get good performance out of ARM platforms.
We
updated the 1S ThunderX platform to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS the same week we received
the 2S ThunderX platform in our data center. It was immediately clear that the
experience was much better. Software that required patching instead worked out
of the box. Packages installed from repos almost every time with even many
multiverse packages working without having to custom compile software. This was
a completely different experience.
The update had two implications. First, unlike Ubuntu 14.04 LTS,
16.04 LTS felt more like it just worked. Second, out of box performance was
much better than in 14.04.
