Cavium Expands the ThunderX2 Server Ecosystem for Cloud and HPC

June 19, 2017

FRANKFURT, Germany and SAN JOSE, Calif., June 19, 2017 — Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, datacenter, cloud, wired and wireless networking, continues to aggressively expand the ThunderX2 server ecosystem with a broad array of commercial and open source partners.

Demonstrating success in working closely with software developers and communities since the initial launch of ThunderX, Cavium has established a significant ecosystem that spans Operating Systems, Development Environments, Tools, and Applications.  An increasing array of hosted options such as Packet.Net and the online Scaleway cloud service offerings, combined with a rich set of single and dual-socket ODM and OEM platforms that include and OCP configurations, allow developers to easily build, develop, and deploy their software on ThunderX based platforms.

The ThunderX2 product family is Cavium’s second-generation 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor SoCs for datacenter, cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The family integrates fully out-of-order, high-performance custom cores supporting single- and dual-socket configurations. ThunderX2 is optimized to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple workload optimized SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with ARMv8-A architecture specifications as well as the ARM Server Base System Architecture and ARM Server Base Boot Requirements standards.

With increasing HPC end user deployments, Cavium has directly delivered key open source software contributions that are particularly targeted for compute-specific applications, such as optimizations for GCC, LLVM, and OpenBLAS.  Cavium continues to actively contribute to the upstream kernel.org enablement for ThunderX2 that supports close collaboration with leading Linux OS partners: Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE.  OpenHPC is a growing community for software and best practices that Cavium has actively supported with reference systems for ARM based build, test, and validation activities.  Building on the open source software that OpenHPC is delivering, many of Cavium’s commercial partners are expanding their commercial support for ThunderX and ThunderX2.

“We have tested and supported Cavium technology since 2015, within the second phase of the Mont-Blanc project, and we recently announced a new Mont-Blanc system based on ThunderX2 developed by Bull atos technologies within the third phase of Mont-Blanc,” says Filippo Mantovani, Senior researcher at Barcelona Supercomputing Center and principal investigator of the Mont-Blanc project. “The collaboration with Cavium has aligned with needs of the HPC community. The development of the PAPI support for the ThunderX SoC has been a great example of this and I am sure we will continue working together for enhancing the ARM ecosystem,” concludes Mantovani.

“The HPC partner community that Cavium is driving on ThunderX2 is further recognition of the growing demand for alternative solutions to solve today’s most significant compute-based problems,” said Larry Wikelius, Vice President of the Software Ecosystem and Solutions Group at Cavium, Inc. “With both commercial and open source alternatives ThunderX2 end users can quickly deploy and manage these platforms in the most optimal fashion with support for the critical development environments and applications they require.”

Supporting Partner Quotes

Altair
“Altair is excited to be working with Cavium to deliver key Altair software products and solutions on the ThunderX2 family of processors.   With a proven track record in the HPC community, Altair’s expertise brings tremendous value to the ThunderX2 platform and will address key end user requirements for workload management and application support.   This collaboration has already delivered results with the initial availability of Thea Render, a high-performance CPU and NVIDIA GPU rendering solution, on ThunderX.  Using Thea Render technology, ThunderX is now able to provide complex photorealistic imagery for applications such as architectural visualization, product design and automotive engineering.  Additionally, PBS Pro supports ARM today, both as part of the pbspro.org open source project and as part the OpenHPC community stack.  Altair is partnering with Cavium to ensure the next major commercial release of PBS Pro will support the ThunderX2.”   Piush Patel – Vice President, Corporate Development for HPC & Cloud

AMI
“American Megatrends considers Cavium as a key partner in our push to expand our server design support capabilities, particularly for the rapidly growing hyperscale market segment. Beginning with the introduction of the original ThunderX platform, AMI and Cavium have a strong history of collaboration, delivering the most complete Firmware / Platform Management solution available for today’s scale-out data center and cloud markets,” said Subramonian Shankar, President, Founder and CEO of American Megatrends. “With our proven track record for Aptio® V UEFI Firmware and MegaRAC® SP-X Management Solutions we are confident that our system partners will benefit greatly from this partnership. In fact, we have already seen this partnership begin to bear fruit in a growing number of rewarding customer engagements. As such, we look forward to continuing to build on our partnership with Cavium and to offer integral support for their products.”

ARM
“The availability of Cavium ThunderX2 processors specifically designed for HPC is a major milestone toward the wide adoption of the ARM architecture in HPC and Cloud,” said Javier Orensanz, General Manager, Development Solutions Group, ARM. “ARM and Cavium have been working closely with many partners to develop and expand the rich ARM-ready ecosystem for HPC. As a result of our collaboration, ARM’s commercially supported compilers and libraries are delivering an increasing number of performance optimizations targeted to HPC applications running on ThunderX2.”

Bright Computing
“Since announcing our partnership in 2015, Bright Computing has worked closely with Cavium’s engineering team to bring Bright’s cluster management software to Cavium’s ThunderX platform.  With a number of mutual clients already expressing interest in leveraging the power of Bright to manage their ARM estate, we are excited by the introduction of Cavium’s ThunderX2 technology and expect this to accelerate the demand.  Bright Computing is proud to be included in Cavium’s ecosystem of partners, and we look forward to playing an important role in empowering Cavium customers to deploy and manage their Cavium-based platforms, quickly and easily.”  Lee Carter – VP WW Alliances Bright Computing

Canonical
“Today’s announcement extends the long-standing partnership between Canonical and Cavium as we continue to combine our core expertise to bring innovative cloud and HPC solutions to the ARMv8-A server market via ThunderX2 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS,” said Anand Krishnan, EVP of Cloud, Canonical.  “ThunderX2 with its HPC and cloud specific optimizations, together with Canonical’s bare metal provisioning (MAAS) and workload orchestration tools (Juju) deliver a solid platform for outstanding performance, deployments at scale and fully automated management.”

Linaro
“Cavium and its hardware platforms have been key to Linaro’s open source collaborative engineering for more than five years,” said George Grey, Linaro CEO. “In the last year, the work has accelerated rapidly, and Linaro now offers Cloud services to developers on member-based ARMv8 hardware located in the US, UK and China. This hardware includes Cavium’s ThunderX, and is being used to work on open source projects including OpenStack, OpenHPC, enterprise optimizations and upstreaming of SVE implementations in GCC, LLVM and QEMU. The Linaro Developer Cloud and QEMU can now be used by ecosystem developers to bootstrap their applications for HPC and data center environments. We continue our strong partnership with Cavium, and we look forward to adding ThunderX2 support to the Linaro Developer Cloud in the near future.”

Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG)
“NAG have been working closely with Cavium and ARM for several years. Cavium’s release of ThunderX2 is a significant step forward in ARM based hardware for the HPC market. Cavium’s second generation ARM server processor, the ThunderX2 offers real opportunities for HPC users. We look forward to continued collaboration with Cavium’s technical team and supporting the end-users.”  John Holden, VP Global Markets – Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG)

Red Hat
“From driving standards to delivering stable development platforms, our collaboration with Cavium in the ARM ecosystem has helped to solidify the basic underpinnings of ARM as a datacenter technology. As customer interest in ARM for next-generation use cases like cloud and high-performance computing begins to grow, Cavium’s contributions, along with those from Red Hat and many other community members, will help to codify how ARM-based systems can best run these modern workloads on emerging hardware and the role accelerators play in modern system designs.”  Jim Totton, Vice President and General Manager, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat

Rogue Wave Software
“Rogue Wave Software is pleased to partner with Cavium. Our TotalView for HPC product supports ThunderX2 platform users with high-scale debugging and detection of memory leaks on the platform,” says Martin Bakal, Principal Product Manager at Rogue Wave Software. “We’re also happy to announce our multi-language, Python and C/C++ support in TotalView version 2017.1 to make it even easier for users to debug and analyze the execution of their complex applications.”

SUSE
“Cavium is a key partner for SUSE as we jointly bring the advantages of Linux for 64-bit ARM processors to enterprise environments,” said Gerald Pfeifer, Vice President of Products and Technology Programs at SUSE. “Building a server ecosystem from the bottom up is an enormous job. With Cavium’s support, we were able to deliver the first commercial Linux distribution for ARM with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and to enable OpenHPC for the ARM platform.”

About Cavium

Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), offers a broad portfolio of infrastructure solutions for compute, security, storage, switching, connectivity and baseband processing. Cavium’s highly integrated multi-core SoC products deliver software compatible solutions across low to high performance points enabling secure and intelligent functionality in Enterprise, Datacenter and Service Provider Equipment. Cavium processors and solutions are supported by an extensive ecosystem of operating systems, tools, application stacks, hardware-reference designs and other products. Cavium is headquartered in San Jose, CA with design centers in California, Massachusetts, India, Israel, China and Taiwan. For more information about the Company, please visit: http://www.cavium.com/.


Source: Cavium

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