ARM, by Chris Adeniyi-Jones

Two common themes emerged during the presentations and discussions at the “ARM: On the Road to HPC” event hosted by the Mont-Blanc project in Barcelona which are particularly relevant to the M2DC project: Energy-Efficiency and Heterogeneity.

The presentations given by the IP and SoC providers described a wide-variety of silicon solutions with different performance/power/price characteristics.

The presentations from the Systems Integrators described their approaches to building high-performance computing systems to meet particular requirements such as power budget and compute throughput.  The inclusion of accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs is increasingly seen as a necessity to meet the computational needs of many workloads.

This as a great validation of the approach being taken by M2DC:  building a flexible server architecture incorporating a mixture of computing devices (each providing an optimal performance/energy for a particular range of application types) plus the integration of power management throughout the entire system which is necessary to optimize the system level energy-efficiency.