Nvidia Corp. was announced Monday to be partnering with ARM Holdings for a launch of the world's first 64-bit ARM development system - an effort that could allow the California tech company to enter the supercomputing market.
The two companies will use Nvidia graphic processors and ARM's CPU cores to build the system designed for high performance, according to PC Magazine. The ARM64 servers will include Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU accelerators and Applied Micro X-GeneARM64 CPUs.
"Nvidia has built the industry's most comprehensive accelerated computing platform - including servers, software, development tools, processors and related technologies - optimized for the HPC industry," said Ian Buck, vice president of Accelerated Computing at Nvidia. "GPUs are the enabling technology that allow server vendors to build HPC-class systems around flexible ARM64 processors. The result is new, highly innovative computing solutions for HPC."
ARM's chips are known for being used to power phones and tablets. The new ARM-based servers will be created to handle computing workloads that need to be completed on a huge scale. These tasks include serving web content for top websites.
The servers will be used in high performance computing (HPC)-targeted systems from Cirrascale Corp., E4 Computer Engineering and Eurotech Group.
The first system, Cirrascale RM1905D, is a high-density two-in-one server that includes two Tesla K20 CPU accelerators, network and storage offload engines, and integrated Ethernet. The server is targeted toward HPC, private cloud, public cloud and enterprise applications. The second system, E4 EK003, is a low-powered 3U, dual-motherboard server appliance featuring two Tesla K20 CPU accelerators. This system is made to work with seismic, signal and image processing, track analysis, video analytics, MapReduce processing and web applications. The third system, Eurotech, is an ultra-high density, energy efficient and modular Aurora HPC server configuration built with proprietary Brick Technology. The system includes direct hot liquid cooling, ZDNet reported.
Nvidia said the first GPU-accelerated ARM64 development platforms from Cirrascale and E4 will be made available in July. The company added that all three vendors are expected to ship their production systems later this year.
