Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology will be used in the Post-K supercomputer being built by Fujitsu.
ARM has upped the supercomputer ante against rivals IBM, Intel and Nvidia with the announcement of Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology.
ARM has upped the supercomputer ante against rivals IBM, Intel and Nvidia with the announcement of Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology.
Developed
for the ARMv8-A architecture, the SVE technology is already set to be used for
the Post-K supercomputer being built by Fujitsu for the RIKEN Advanced Institute
for Computational Science in Japan.
Unveiled
at the Hot Chips conference in the US, the technology supports vectors from
128-bit to 2048-bit. Shifting the vector calculation problem from software to
hardware, SVE technology will be a scalable extension to the ARM instruction
set.
Vector
processors drove early supercomputers, but were then replaced by less expensive
IBM RISC chips in the early 1990s. In today’s high-performance servers x86
processors are used, but this could be set to shift with the industry seeing a
renewed reliance on vector processing.
The
move my ARM to introduce this alternative chip architecture is a sign of the
company’s plans to move deeper into the server, data centre and
high-performance computing (HPC) space while offering something different to
rivals.
The
new chip design could soon be running the world’s most powerful supercomputer
if the plans for the Post-K supercomputer comes to fruition. Fujitsu chose ARM
in July 2016 for the supercomputer, shifting from the 2GHz Sun Sparc64 cores
used in the K supercomputer. If the build goes smoothly, the new supercomputer
could be capable of 1,000 petaflops.
The
announcement at Hot Chips follows the recent acquisition of the UK chip maker
by Japanese company SoftBank. With the price set at $32 billion, the acquisition
hopes to sharpen ARM’s focus in the server and internet of things space.
