World’s Largest ARM-Based Supercomputer Launched, as Exascale Heats Up

Keeping workloads local and moving data minimally are key goals in the push to build exascale-class computing hardware, given the tremendous energy cost of moving data from Point A to B. “We can see clearly that the amount of power required to move data inside the system is an order of magnitude greater than the amount of power needed to compute that data,” explained Vildibill.

In recent years, the US government has doled out $258M towards exascale computing in grants to a number of companies, including AMD, Intel, HPE, Cray, IBM, and Nvidia. Overall power consumption will be 1.2MW, an amount the TOP500 press release characterizes as “respectable energy efficiency.” The system will be backed up by 350TB of storage and is intended to search for new methods of managing America’s aging nuclear arsenal. The installation is also a kind of test run for ARM hardware in these kinds of situations overall, and to examine its performance characteristics in scenarios that ARM hasn’t historically been used to test.

Sandia’s calculations are reportedly bandwidth-limited, and some of Cavium’s Thunder X2 CPUs have up to eight DDR4 memory controllers, capable of providing up to 170GB/s of bandwidth per socket. HP is making this push as part of its overall Memory Driven Computing architecture approach, in which the company is emphasizing the amount of memory channels and total connected RAM it can offer with its servers. In this case, you don’t technically need to go with ARM to maximize per-socket memory bandwidth — AMD also uses up to eight channels in its Epyc line of CPUs — but the move to deploy a test ARM system is also important for validating that ARM hardware and servers are up to the challenge of serving in this environment.

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