In this video, NVIDIA’s Duncan Poole and Arm’s David Lecomber explain how the two company’s accelerate the world’s fastest supercomputers.
At SC19, NVIDIA introduced a reference design platform that enables companies to quickly build GPU-accelerated Arm-based servers, driving a new era of high performance computing for a growing range of applications in science and industry. The reference design platform — consisting of hardware and software building blocks — responds to growing demand in the HPC community to harness a broader range of CPU architectures. It allows supercomputing centers, hyperscale-cloud operators and enterprises to combine the advantage of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform with the latest Arm-based server platforms.
To build the reference platform, NVIDIA is teaming with Arm and its ecosystem partners — including Ampere, Fujitsu and Marvell — to ensure NVIDIA GPUs can work seamlessly with Arm-based processors. The reference platform also benefits from strong collaboration with Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, and HPE, two early providers of Arm-based servers. Additionally, a wide range of HPC software companies have used NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries to build GPU-enabled management and monitoring tools that run on Arm-based servers.
There is a renaissance in high performance computing,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. “Breakthroughs in machine learning and AI are redefining scientific methods and enabling exciting opportunities for new architectures. Bringing NVIDIA GPUs to Arm opens the floodgates for innovators to create systems for growing new applications from hyperscale-cloud to exascale supercomputing and beyond.”
Rene Haas, president of the IP Products Group at Arm, said: “Arm is working with ecosystem partners to deliver unprecedented performance and efficiency for exascale-class Arm-based SoCs. Collaborating with NVIDIA to bring CUDA acceleration to the Arm architecture is a key milestone for the HPC community, which is already deploying Arm technology to address some of the world’s most complex research challenges and driving further advances in the embedded, automotive and edge segments.”
The reference platform’s debut follows NVIDIA’s announcement earlier this year that it will bring its CUDA-X software platform to Arm. Fulfilling this promise, NVIDIA is making available as a preview its Arm-compatible software development kit, consisting of NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries and development tools for accelerated computing.
Collaboration with Broader HPC Ecosystem
In addition to making its own software compatible with Arm, NVIDIA is working closely with its broad ecosystem of developers to bring GPU acceleration to Arm for HPC applications such as GROMACS, LAMMPS, MILC, NAMD, Quantum Espresso and Relion. NVIDIA and its HPC-application ecosystem partners have compiled extensive code to bring GPU acceleration to their applications on the Arm platform.
To enable the Arm ecosystem, NVIDIA collaborated with leading Linux distributors Canonical, Red Hat, Inc., and SUSE, as well as the industry’s leading providers of essential HPC tools.
World-leading supercomputing centers have begun testing GPU-accelerated Arm-based computing systems. This includes Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories, in the United States; the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom; and Riken, in Japan.
