Supercomputer 2022 finally again took place (primarily) in person and was a good opportunity to catch up on the many developments related to Arm- and RISC-V-based solutions for HPC.
RISC-V has been a key topic in Luca Benini’s plenary talk on “Open Platforms for Energy-Efficient Scalable Computing”, where he presented his results on processor designs aiming for minimizing the overhead associated with data transfer, data-flow management, as well as instruction management. RISC-V based architectures are becoming attractive because the modular approach of RISC-V helps address the growing demand for specialized cores — such as an IPU, VPU, NPU, or TPU. This enables designers to add application-specific extensions on top of their solutions to optimize them for different requirements, such as power, performance, and size.
At SC22 different Arm-based server-class processors had been presented including Ampere Altra, AWS Graviton 3, and NVIDIA Grace. Performance results on Arm-based HPC systems as well as an outlook of upcoming solutions like SiPearl’s first CPU had been topics during the Arm HPC User Group (AHUG) SC22 Symposium. During the symposium also work supported by OEHI has been presented by Dirk Pleiter.
On a more general level, LEONARDO, hosted by CINECA and co-funded by the European Commission and by the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research, ranked 4th in the TOP500, and for the first time since the list was published, 2 systems installed in European datacenters are in the top 5 spots.
