Fujitsu goes up in ARMs

[williamcll]

Not too long before ex-apple Nuvia announced their goal of building chips for enterprise, Fujitsu has also begin supplying their CPUs based off the ARM architecture which has been under works since last year.

Quote

Cray has said it will build a family of supercomputers for government research labs and universities. The kicker? The exascale machines will be powered by Arm-compatible microprocessors.

The HPE-owned biz has partnered with Fujitsu to roll out the beefy big iron. Fujitsu will supply its homegrown A64FX processors – understood to be 48-core 64-bit Armv8-compatible beasts – to drive applications on the systems, while Cray will integrate the chippery into its line of CS500 supers.

It’s still early days, so the full specs aren’t out yet nor even the codenames for the exaFLOPS-grade computers. The exascale kit is expected to ship from 2020 to the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as Stony Brook University in New York. Elsewhere in the world, other institutions including the RIKEN center for computational science in Japan, and the University of Bristol in the UK are eagerly awaiting the toy sets.

RIKEN is due to receive its own highly customized A64FX-powered exascale super, dubbed Post-K, from Fujitsu; the Cray-built one will sit alongside it.

 

Cray’s gear, in recent times anyway, usually houses x86 processors, such as Intel Xeons and lately AMD Epycs. These latest additions to its portfolio of machines, however, will be decked out with Arm-based CPU cores.

Fujitsu’s A64FX supports high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and Arm's Scalable Vector Extensions, a set of instructions to accelerate matrix calculations, making it ideal for physics simulations, machine-learning workloads, and such number-crunching. The maximum theoretical HBM RAM bandwidth will be greater than one terabyte per second, Cray claimed.

The new supercomputers will likely be used to model complex 3D systems, from the weather and materials to nuclear energy and weapons.

“The most demanding computing work at Los Alamos National Laboratory involves sparse, irregular, multi-physics, multi-link-scale, highly resolved, long running 3D simulations,” said Gary Grider, deputy division leader of the HPC division at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Wednesday. “There are few existing architectures that currently serve this workload well.”

Source:https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/13/cray_fujitsu_arm_supercomputer/

https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/08/24/fujitsus-a64fx-arm-chip-waves-the-hpc-banner-high/
Thoughts: Another thing I probably won't ever buy in my lifetime, but hey competition is always good regardless how poor their business practices may be.

[Bombastinator]

Wow.  Cray.  I thought they were dead.  I have a very embarrassing story about cray.  Remember that old cray supercomputer that had a Mac laptop bolted to the front so it could have a spinning graphic logo?  The thing everyone made fun of? That’s actually my fault.

 

The guy who made that logo worked at the computer lab at my school and was bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t use his spinning logo on the super computers because he built it on a 65k Mac.

i was the idiot who had the idea to bolt the thing to the front of the machine and use it as a spare terminal.  He wanted that logo so bad and didn’t have anything else to show.  I felt bad.   I felt worse when they actually did it and it got into the news.

People laughed at that one for years.

 

i thought I helped kill the company.  They’re still alive though!  Yay!

[leadeater]

9 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Wow.  Cray.  I thought they were dead.

They made a big comeback a few years ago and have done many of the largest and most recent Top 500 deployments, back to being a pretty big deal which is why I was so surprised HPE acquired them but I guess it was a now or never thing because any longer and it would have cost too much.

 

[Ezzy-525]

6 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Wow.  Cray.  I thought they were dead.  I have a very embarrassing story about cray.  Remember that old cray supercomputer that had a Mac laptop bolted to the front so it could have a spinning graphic logo?  The thing everyone made fun of? That’s actually my fault.

 

The guy who made that logo worked at the computer lab at my school and was bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t use his spinning logo on the super computers because he built it on a 65k Mac.

i was the idiot who had the idea to bolt the thing to the front of the machine and use it as a spare terminal.  He wanted that logo so bad and didn’t have anything else to show.  I felt bad.   I felt worse when they actually did it and it got into the news.

People laughed at that one for years.

 

i thought I helped kill the company.  They’re still alive though!  Yay!

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, Ezzy-525 said:

I don’t know why I mentioned it either.  Old people ramble.  I guess I just hoped it was entertaining to someone.  It was late.  And I’m really glad cray didn’t die.  It was something I carried with me I felt bad about.