On Jan 14th, 2019, not yet half a month into the new year,  HPC Asia held its annual conference in Guangzhou, China. Led by Linaro, with Arm ecosystem partners, the Linaro workshop“Open Source HPC on Arm Architecture”was held on the first day of HPC Asia 2019. It is the first time in the events 20 year history that Arm ecosystem partners have joined forces under the leadership of Linaro.

HPC Asia is an authoritative international conference on HPC and the related researches held in the Asia Pacific region for decades, promoting the rapid development of HPC in Asia and deeper collaboration around the globe. After 10 years, while countries around the world are racing towards Extreme Computing, HPC Asia came back to China in 2019 after its 2018 annual conference in Japan. While the global collaboration faces challenges today, Linaro leads the win-win collaboration in HPC around the world through open source.

This  Linaro workshop “Open Source HPC on Arm Architecture” included presentations, a Q&A and a roundtable panel session. You can view all presentations and slides here.

The participants and guest speakers included world leading experts from RIKEN (Japan), HTFC Hartree center (UK), and the HPC center of Shanghai Jiaotong University (China). Industry leaders from Arm, Linaro, Huawei, Fujitsu, Phytium, Gigabyte, HPC Systems Inc., Skymizer, and Quantum Cloud covered everything from chip design to software architecture, system integration, AI and cloud applications. Linaro experts flew from Europe and the US to Guangzhou and shared updates on progress in the Arm HPC ecosystem collaboration, and put forward their research and insights in AI on HPC.

Topics at the workshop covered all aspects of the Arm server ecosystem, from chip design, hardware, software architecture and standardization to performance tuning, and applications in biology, medicine, meteorology, astronomy, geography etc. It is exciting to see that Arm servers are being used in so many areas, contributing significantly to the global economy.

As the Arm HPC world leader, experts from RIKEN and Fujitsu shared details of Post-K design,  revealed the keys to achieve high performance capabilities and gain high memory bandwidth. They also shared the AI Deep Learning research on Post-K. They pointed out the clear path for the next steps of HPC development. As a partner in HPC application, Quantum Cloud put forward Fabric-Based Arm SoC solution,  Socionext SynQuacer via PCIe Fabric for networking, a very practical and novel method for implementing HPC with Arm SoC chips.  Huawei, Phytium and Fujitsu introduced their roadmaps, strategies, newest products and applications of HPC. HPC Systems Inc. demonstrated their application and cloud services based on Arm HPC on-site. Gigabyte, a system integration company, showed several comercial Arm server solutions, which are helping HPC servers to materialize. Many experts showed the Arm HPC progress through all sorts of benchmark test results. Linaro provided the “Open Innovation” stage for all partners to show their solutions, and let their diversity shine.

Several experts emphasized the role of AI acceleration based on Arm SVE, and Arm server standardization. They also acknowledged Linaro’s efforts in reducing fragmentation through open source collaboration and the Arm ServerReady program. Arm pointed out that as an example, Astra, the first Arm based cluster built at Sandia National Laboratories in the US( Sandia National Laboratories joined Linaros HPC group in August 2018),  illustrates that the time for supercomputers based on Arm-based technology has come. Arm would like to see all partners continue to make progress by collaborating in the open source community. It was inspiring to see the expert disclosures at this workshop. The Q&A sessions were very engaging.

Dr. Mohamed Wahib at Linaro workshop

Arm & Linaro ecosystem partners at Linaro workshop

Linaro session at a separate workshop  “Vendor Vision” during HPC Asia 2019 Annual conference. Presented by Elsie Wahlig, Sr. Director of Linaro Data Centre & Cloud Group (LDCG) & HPC SIG and Renato Golin, Tech Lead of HPC SIG, Linaro

Roundtable Panel hosted by Elsie Wahlig, Sr. Director of LDCG & HPC SIG. The topic was “Frontiers of AI deployments in HPC on Arm.

Guests:  Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka, Riken / Luba,  CEO Skymizer / Pak Lui, Principal Architect, Huawei

Demo booths

Huawei, Gigabyte and Skymizer showing their Arm servers and AI application

Q&A: Engaging discussion among scientists from various national HPC labs

Just after the Linaro workshop, HPC Asia core founders and steering committee members congratulated Linaro, saying they thought this workshop was“terrific!”

Jill Guo, EVP Linaro, head of Linaro Greater China, made the welcome speech and announced the upcoming Linaro BKK19 Connect in Bangkok,Thailand.