ARM Launches ARMv8-A

As a founding member of OpenHPC, ARM has stated that ARMv8-A will be the first alternative architecture with OpenHPC support. The initial baseline release of OpenHPC for ARMv8-A will be available as part of the forthcoming OpenHPC v1.2 release at SC16. This is yet another milestone that levels the playing field for the ARM server ecosystem and will accelerate choice within the HPC community, the company states.

To support this latest release of ARMv8, the company has also collaborated with Cavium and SUSE to bring the newest hardware and software. Cavium provided their latest dual-socket servers based on ThunderX for installation at the TACC site in Austin, TX and SUSE has just recently announced full ARMv8-A support in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12. Taken all together, engineers now have a complete open and standards-based HPC platform covering hardware, OS, and a full set of community-defined HPC software tools, all pre-built and tested on the ARMv8-A architecture.

Additionally, ARM is announcing a pair of commercial Linux user-space compilers running natively on ARMv8-A hardware and generating code for the current and future generations of the ARMv8-A architecture. Both compilers will initially support C/C++, with Fortran support on the way in 2017.  We’ve split the compiler products into two choices, based on the user needs:

• ARM compiler for HPC: Optimized for Neon vectorization on ARMv8-A, the compiling environment combines the ARM Performance Libraries.
• ARM SVE compiler for HPCSupports the recently announced Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE). Includes compiler auto-vectorization passes, SVE-tuned kernels in the ARM Performance Libraries, and the ARM Instruction Emulator, which allows SVE application binaries to execute on non-SVE ARMv8-A systems available today.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.