Arm hardware has long been used in the mobile space due to power-efficient designs, but the last few years have also seen a rise in high-performance Arm processors. The Fujitsu-designed A64FX processor is a prime example of this next generation of Arm for HPC – each node includes an SSD, HDR InfiniBand, a 48 core A64FX processor, and 32 GB of on-board High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with up to 1 TB of main memory bandwidth. Additionally, the processor supports Arm’s new Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), a compiler-supported vector architecture that supports 512 bit wide instructions.
The CRNCH Rogues Gallery is happy to be one of the first institutions in the US to support public access to this architecture as part of the NSF MRI award 1828187: “MRI: Acquisition of an HPC System for Data-Driven Discovery in Computational Astrophysics, Biology, Chemistry, and Materials Science.” Specifically, this new cluster, “Octavius”, is deployed to provide domain scientists and architecture researchers a new opportunity to evaluate their AVX-512 based codes on SVE-enabled hardware, and we anticipate providing joint access to this resouce as part of the Georgia Tech Hive project.
What about that name?:
Our new A64FX cluster, Octavius, is named after a classic rogue from the Spider-verse, Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius, aka Doc Ock. The naming collides with our love of bad puns as both Doc Ock and Octavius have lots of (A)rms that can be deployed for a variety of tasks. In the cluster’s case, this reflects how these new Arm HPC nodes can tackle both traditional SIMD-style HPC algorithms, memory-intensive workloads, and emerging machine learning applications.
How do I acknowledge the use of this resource?:
Octavius is funded via a separate NSF program and is part of the “Hive” supercomputer infrastructure hosted by PACE. For work specifically using the A64FX system, please use the following acknowledgment:
“This research was supported by the NSF MRI award #1828187: “MRI: Acquisition of an HPC System for Data-Driven Discovery in Computational Astrophysics, Biology, Chemistry, and Materials Science.”
What’s available currently?:
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Systems
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CPU
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Memory
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Programming Tools
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Notes
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Hosting Machine |
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Apollo 80
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Arm A64FX, 1.8 GHz |
32 GB HBM2
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Cray PE
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16 node cluster, connected via EDR IB switch
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Octavius |
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Coming soon!
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Brainard | ||||
| Jetson Xavier NX | Available for student usage | N/A |
Tools: Cray Programming Environment, Arm Programming Environment, Clang 10, GCC 11
Primary Contact: Jeffrey Young
Restrictions: None
Related Projects: HIVE cluster