Arm today announced expanded support for HPC with availability of Arm Allinea Studio. The expanded tool suite provides access to Arm-specific compliers and libraries alongside debug and optimization tools. Arm says the move means the Arm server ecosystem “now has access to an end-to-end commercial suite for building and porting High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.”
Writing in his blog, David Lecomber, senior director, infrastructure tools, offered, “As new Arm-based infrastructure hardware is developed by our ecosystem of partners, such as Cavium and Qualcomm, it’s vital that HPC users can run their applications on new hardware solutions. Such developments, along with the availability of a complete tools suite from Arm and the wider open and commercial ecosystem signal an unprecedented opportunity for HPC. Users are now beginning to evaluate Arm server-class technology for scientific applications and to test the performance of applications across what is gradually becoming a more open vendor base.”
Suitability of Arm for HPC is an ongoing discussion in HPC with sturdy advocates and skeptics. Fujitsu, of course dumped Sparc in favor of Arm for its post K supercomputer. Several other high-end efforts in Europe are also underway such as the Isambard project in the U.K.
Highlight features of the Arm Allinea Studio include:
- Arm Fortran Compiler,released as a beta compiler in June 2017, is now a fully supported commercial Fortran compiler with Fortran 2003 and prior standards support.
- Arm C/C++ Compileris an LLVM-based commercial compiler with support for C++ 14 standard and tuned for server and HPC workloads on a wide-range of Arm-based platforms.
- The Arm Performance Librariesare processor-optimized math libraries with BLAS, LAPACK and FFT functionality for HPC applications on Arm-based hardware.
- Arm Forge(formerly Allinea Forge) now comprises Arm DDT, the powerful scalable debugger, and Arm MAP, the parallel profiler for debugging, profiling, and optimizing applications.
- Arm Performance Reports(formerly Allinea Performance Reports) is a non-intrusive performance tool that can analyze the applications running on your system to seek out inefficiencies and pinpoint exactly where to focus optimization work.
Lecomber’s blog included a testimonial from Simon McIntosh-Smith, head of the high-performance computing research group at the University of Bristol, “Using Arm’s software tools, we’ve been able to successfully analyze, then port real-world, complex scientific codes, getting them ready for the world’s first large-scale production Arm-based supercomputer, Isambard.”
Link to blog: https://community.arm.com/tools/b/blog/posts/arm-announces-its-most-comprehensive-tool-suite-for-the-hpc-ecosystem