Spanish super operator to launch ARM architecture super

Recently, there is indeed a lot of news about arm. First was ARM's announcement of the arm V8 architecture, which supports 64-bit operations, and Hewlett-Packard quickly announced a message that would develop a server architecture product based on the processor. Yesterday, the Spanish National Supercomputing Agency, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), announced that it would build the world's first supercomputer based on the ARM architecture CPU.

The BSC program-built supercomputer will use the Nvidia Tegra 34 core ARM CORTEX-A9 processor, as well as the NVIDIA mobile model Cuda GPU (which appears to be GeForce GT 520M) that conforms to the MXM 3.0 standard to accelerate the calculation. It is expected to be officially available in the first half of 2012-2013.

Of course, the direction of BSc's approach is not the number of 7gflops/w on the Super Computer 500, which is correspondingly to increase the performance/power ratio (target) and try to take the top spot on the green supercomputer list.

As the future of large supercomputers power consumption is 10mw-20mw, equivalent to a small town power. As before, Nvidia has also stated that it is important to control energy consumption rather than to exascale level computing, while BSC builds HPC based on the ARM architecture is an important step on this road. It is also a pioneering--echelon for the real Exascale cornerstone of the upcoming 2013, as well as "Project Denver".

The series of big moves in the arm system not only proves that the arm ecosystem exists, but that the offensive momentum is quite fierce. On the other hand, in the face of this new pattern of competition and expansion, the choice of the traditional processors and servers will be noteworthy. Is it against the enemy or open arms to greet the new technology? No matter how to choose, the future will be surging.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)