5 ms·

Seems like ARMv8 + SVE could provide some decent competition for the Xeon Phi. In a way both are heirs to the IBM blue gene line (lots of low power cores) and "

• dman 9y ago
  Big question is that as a developer how I get access to one of these.
  • jabl 9y ago
    Indeed. Heck, even if we forget about SVE, where can I get my hands on an armv8 box that I could use as a desktop so I could dogfood while developing, without paying an arm and a leg for some server hardware?
    • timthorn 9y ago
      Avantek do one: https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-32-core-cavium-thunderx-arm-desktop.html https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-32-core-cavium-thund...
  • jcbeard 9y ago
    If you're interested in seeing more about what people are currently doing with ARM, check out the slides at http://www.goingarm.com/#2017schedule http://www.goingarm.com/#2017schedule For buying a machine, it depends on what you want. Desktops are coming out now, for example: https://softiron.com/products/overdrive-1000/ https://softiron.com/products/overdrive-1000/ Server/HPC, there are quite a few coming online. The Cavium presenter @goingarm listed (https://www.packet.net https://www.packet.net) on their slides, might be decent for getting a cloud instance to try out. There are many others. A good place to start finding them is: http://arm-hpc.gitlab.io http://arm-hpc.gitlab.io. A nice thing about ARM is that you get lots of different micro-arch under a single ISA. Once the ball gets rolling there will be many processor choices to choose from, which I think is a great thing (however, in full disclosure I'm one of the authors, and I work for ARM Research for our HPC program..although all statements above are my own opinion and not those of ARM).
    • dman 9y ago
      Thanks for pointing softiron out. This might be the only shipping amd arm solution that I have seen.
      • jcbeard 9y ago
        At ISC17 they had these at the Gigabyte booth....with multi-GPU configs (see GPGPU on top). https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4tfh1u3NMxnTThSdEswR2o1SXc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4tfh1u3NMxnTThSdEswR2o1SXc...
• arcanus 9y ago
  Anything with a pulse can provide decent competition for Xeon Phi. It is well know these 'accelerators' are barely providing speed-ups compared to existing CPU solutions. While Phi are easy to port, they aren't close to GPUs for vectorization-friendly problems. This is likely why the Aurora supercomputer has been delayed/canceled.
  • jabl 9y ago
    I wonder why noone (?) has tried to bolt on a GPU style SIMT extension to a general purpose CPU architecture. It's a more flexible programming model with a decently(?) low additional cost compared to vector style SIMD. IIRC Andy Glew had some slide deck where he advocated that. Edit: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5qTWL2s3LcQNGE3NWI4NzQtNTBhNS00YjgyLTljZGMtNTA0YjJmMGIzNDEw/view?ddrp=1&hl=en https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5qTWL2s3LcQNGE3NWI4NzQtNTB...
    • Arelius 9y ago
      My understanding is the instruction set isn't as far removed as you seem to imply, and the huge differences are in programming model/compiler. AVX-512 has many of the primitives required, and ISPC ports the GPU programming model to CPU SIMD.
      • jabl 9y ago
        Yes, AVX-512 IIRC adds scatter/gather, and masking/predication, bringing it substantially closer to classical supercomputer long vector ISA's compared to the short vector ISA's mainstream CPU's have been equipped with for the past decade or so. Still, even with these improvements, as explained in Andy Glew's slide deck I linked to, it's less flexible than a SIMT style approach.
  • jxy 9y ago
    Where do you get the information that Aurora is canceled?
    • jcbeard 9y ago