Linaro Ltd, the open source collaborative engineering organization developing software for the Arm® ecosystem, announced today that Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) has joined Linaro’s High Performance Compute (HPC) Special Interest Group as an advanced end user of mission-critical HPC systems.
In June 2018, Sandia announced that in the late summer it expected to deploy Astra, one of the first supercomputers to use processors based on the Arm architecture in a large-scale high-performance computing platform. This system, which is due to be deployed in September, requires a complete vertically integrated software stack for Arm: from the operating system through compilers and math libraries. Sandia and Linaro will work together with the other members of the HPC SIG to jointly address hardware and software challenges, expand the HPC ecosystem by developing and proving new technologies and increase technology and vendor choices for future platforms.
“Determining the viability of the Arm ecosystem for supporting of our mission applications requires a significant, concentrated effort,” said Kevin Pedretti, Principal Member of Technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories and systems software lead for Astra. “By joining the Linaro HPC SIG, we plan to collaborate on Astra’s software stack components, ensuring our HPC applications work efficiently while benefitting the wider HPC community. We expect that Linaro’s expertise in Arm software will help enable us to accelerate the demonstration of Arm as a viable option for running our large-scale production HPC applications and enable us to work more effectively with the wider Arm community.”
Sandia supports the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to ensure specialized components are developed, tested and produced, and that the United States’ nuclear weapons are quality assured. The NNSA runs the Vanguard Program, the purpose of which is to evaluate different high-performance computing technologies to determine whether they can help support the NNSA’s mission to maintain safety, security and effectiveness of the US nuclear stockpile. As a result, Sandia has made significant investment over the past seven years as part of its Advanced Architecture testbed program to help grow the ecosystem for Arm processors in HPC.
Linaro and its members created the HPC Special Interest Group (SIG) in September 2016 to drive the adoption of Arm in high-performance computing through standardisation, interoperability, orchestration and use case development. Linaro provides a forum where SoCs, system vendors, integrators, users, distros, hyperscalers can co-develop the foundational software to make choice easier for the desired application space. The HPC SIG is currently working to leverage Arm hardware around server class infrastructure, multi-gigabit interconnect support, scalable vector extensions and software ecosystem support to build exascale HPC deployments. The focus is on three segments: hardware deployment, software ecosystem and optimised libraries.
“We’re very pleased to welcome Sandia to the HPC SIG and we look forward to working with them and the other industry leading HPC SIG members to enable the most effective deployment and management of Arm-based HPC solutions,” said Kanta Vekaria, Director of the Linaro HPC SIG. “Sandia’s Vanguard Astra will be the world’s largest Arm-based supercomputer used by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to run advanced modelling and simulation workloads for mission critical applications in areas including national security, energy and science. This sets an impressive vision that we look forward to helping Sandia achieve.”
About Sandia National Laboratories
Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.
About Linaro
Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 300 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.
To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit https://www.linaro.org and https://www.96Boards.org .