New Arm-Based Systems: The UK Explores Next Stage of ArmBased HPC with Isambard Upgrades

On April 16, 2018, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in conjunction with SUSE and Arm teamed up with three leading UK universities to form the Catalyst UK program with the objective of accelerating the adoption of HPC by industry in the UK. The three-year program will center on the installation of an Arm processor-based supercomputer deployment spread across the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bristol, and the University of Leicester, due to be completed in summer 2018. In addition, the program is looking to reach out to UK industry to jointly develop Arm-based applications and workflows. Hyperion Research believes this effort is an important indicator of the UK’s commitment to building an indigenous HPC ecosystem centered on Arm processors, and one that could have wider implications for bolstering Arm-based HPC adoption in future European HPC designs.

This Quick Take looks at Amazon's recent announcement of a new EC2 Bare Metal offering that provides users with direct, non-virtualized access to a processor, memory, storage and related networking instance. Amazon uses custom hardware in an effort to wring out the highest possible performance from the basic hardware set up while still offering a full complement of cloud-based software support. This development is a positive one for HPC users looking to migrate workloads to public clouds as Amazon is addressing one of the most vexinghurdles of HPC in the cloud: the performance overhead of running applicationsin a virtualized, performance limiting environment.