ARM64 with CUDA Early Access Boards Now Available

The X-Gene™ ARM64 and CUDA Development Platform for High Performance Computing (HPC) is now available to order from Cirrascale, the US Applied Micro (APM) integration partner. This board represents an entry point for ARM64 + CUDA into the enterprise markets as well.

The X-Gene™ board features custom high-performance ARM v8 processor based on an advanced 64-bit ARM architecture plus network and storage offload engines and integrated Ethernet.

The XC-1™ development kit includes APM’s X-Gene™ ARM64 CPU and CUDA GPU.

CUDA Specs:

Includes Dynamic parallelism and Hyper-Q for boosted computing performance, higher power efficiency and record application speeds
Number and Type of GPU – 1 Kepler GK110
Peak double precision floating point performance – 1.17 Tflops
Peak single precision floating point performance – 3.52 Tflops
Memory bandwidth (ECC off) – 208 GB/sec
Memory size (GDDR5) – 5 GB
(It looks like this is a PCIe GEN3 x8 solution: Note SoftIron motherboard announcement + X-Gene driver documentation, which notes “X-Gene PCIe controller supports maximum up to 8 lanes and GEN3 speed”.)

Availability Next Month

The first GPU-accelerated ARM64 development platforms will be available in July from Cirrascale Corp. and E4 Computer Engineering, with production systems expected to ship later this year. The Eurotech Group also plans to ship production systems later this year. System details include:

Cirrascale RM1905D – High-density two-in-one 1U server with two Tesla K20 GPU accelerators; provides high-performance, low total cost of ownership for private cloud, public cloud, HPC, and enterprise applications.
E4 EK003 – Production-ready, low-power 3U, dual-motherboard server appliance with two Tesla K20 GPU accelerators, designed for seismic, signal and image processing, video analytics, track analysis, web applications and MapReduce processing.
Eurotech – Ultra-high density, energy efficient and modular Aurora HPC server configuration, based on proprietary Brick Technology and featuring direct hot liquid cooling.

NVIDIA is demonstrating new ARM development systems at the International Supercomputing Conference, June 23-26, in booth 230.

According to ZDnet both Applied Micro and Canonical claim the first ARM 64-bit server production software deployment and plan to demo the OpenStack cloud using Ubuntu Linux on an X-Gene server.