The world's largest pc arm will be used in a nuclear laboratory
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Astra, the largest ARM-based supercomputer ever made. Developed in conjunction with the Department of Energy, it is being adopted by the Sandia National Laboratory as a new experimental platform for nuclear research.
Astra is the largest ARM-based supercomputer ever made
Since it works with Cavium ThunderX2 ARM processors, it is considerably more energy efficient and denser (meaning more hardware can fit) than a comparable x86 system. Remarkably, that ARM chipset also offers 33% more memory speed than many x86 CPUs.
Astra is based on HP's Apollo system and consists of more than 145, 000 cores on 2, 592 dual-processor servers. The 28-core ThunderX2 processors also offer eight memory channels, compared to the six found on typical x86 chips. At its peak, HP claims Astra can offer 2.3 performance PFLOPs, making it among the 100 fastest supercomputers in the world (according to top500.org).
In addition, each of the CPUs in the system has direct access to a large amount of memory. That's a big difference from the CPU-centric computing we see today, where each chip has access to small amounts of memory, and it's difficult to share information between processors.
At Sandia Labs, Astra will be part of a Vanguard prototyping program, which focuses on finding new technologies to fulfill its primary mission: managing the United States' nuclear reserves. Specifically, it will be a test to see how well an ARM-based system can handle all the physical simulations Sandia performs on a daily basis.
Typical Sandia applications are "particularly bandwidth sensitive, " says James Laros, project leader for the Vanguard, to the point that applications are sometimes overloaded and slowed down by their caches. Laros compares the jump in ARM bandwidth to when AMD put a memory controller in its CPUs back in 2003, which gave those chips a huge speed advantage over Intel's.
While being tested, Astra will not replace any existing system at Sandia, but Laros says it will likely end up being a production system over time.
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