The Arm HPC Experience - From Testbeds to Exascale

The Arm architecture has grown in availability and usability for the HPC community in just the past few years.  This is demonstrated by several Arm-based projects around the world, including the Japanese Post-K, European Mont-Blanc, U.S. DOE/NNSA Vanguard, the UK’s GW4/EPSRC efforts. Furthermore, the commercial availability of Arm nodes from HPC vendors such as Cray, Gigabyte, HPE, and Ingrasys also demonstrate the viability of Arm architectures. The Arm HPC community is growing substantially as the hardware is being tailored for HPC workloads via additions, such as the Armv8-A Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) technology, and its software stack is growing to meet HPC applications needs.

Lightning talks

This will be the second Arm BOF at the SC conference, bringing together experts from the HPC community, including national laboratories, vendors, and international research centers, to give short, lightning-talk presentations about how the current state-of-the-art of the Arm HPC ecosystem could be advanced to meet the applications requirements of the future.  These short talks will be offered by HPC ecosystem experts, researchers, and users in various fields and will cover a wide array of topics surrounding the Arm ecosystem including compilers, operating systems, runtime environments, fabric enablement, performance tools, scientific libraries, system software, benchmarks and HPC applications. Presenters may even be able to share initial performance results which will be of direct interest to expected attendees. This will provide an opportunity for the HPC community to learn about the latest research and development, share the state-of-the-art, understand the rapid progress made within the Arm HPC ecosystem, and discuss the future of HPC and Arm.

Panel session

Following initial presentations, we will hold a panel session to create active discussion between the BoF participants and audience.  The panelists are:

  • Mitsuhisa Sato (RIKEN)
  • Andrew Younge (SNL)
  • Gopal Patnaik (NRL)
  • Simon McIntosh-Smith (University of Bristol)

This panel will give attendees the opportunity to engage and interact with early adopters and contributors, learn about current development efforts and engage the discussion of future trends of Arm-based technologies as the industry advances.  This panel will open the floor to discuss the latest advances in the Arm ecosystem with a two-pronged approach for panel discussion.  First, a moderator will seed group discussion surrounding the hardware advances in Arm.  Initial topics will include relevant challenges in system architecture, networking, memory system designs, and accelerators; all of which are of key drivers for the future of the HPC community. In particular, we would like to discuss the SVE technology and its potential impact on users and compilers of interest.

Then, the panel moderator will initiate detailed conversation surrounding the current state of the HPC software ecosystem of Arm. This will enable the audience to discuss advances in OS and compilers, runtime components, system libraries, scientific tools, programming models, and even share application porting experiences.  The result of this BOF will be for attendees help create a holistic picture of the current advancements as well as future trends in both hardware and software of Arm-based supercomputing.  After the BOF, we will produce a report of the topics discussed which relate to the Arm HPC ecosystem and define a mailing list of Arm users. 

Join us at SC18 on Wednesday, November 14th, 5:15pm - 6:45pm to participate in this session.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to our panelists, moderators, and especially John Wohlbier (Engility) and Andrew Younge (SNL) for their significant contributions to this event.

Further information