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NVIDIA - Arm reference server.

The engines powering the modern data center have long been made by Intel, however, the increasing diversity of workloads coupled with this decades secular deceleration of x86 performance improvements have prompted processor designers, application developers and infrastructure operators to look for alternatives.

While Intel wont lose its dominant position in data centers anytime soon, several trends eroding its position have been on full display recently, including:

These trends have been percolating for several years, mostly below the attention of enterprise technology executives, however, rapidly maturing technology and a relentless pursuit of higher performance by hyperscale cloud builders and high-performance computing (HPC) users have incubated an environment favorable to non-Intel alternatives. Recent events illustrate the rapid architectural changes within the AI and HPC communities that have longer-term implications for the average enterprise.

The SC supercomputing conferences were once niche events tailored to and dominated by researchers in government labs, academia and HPC vendors seeking to score some benchmarking victories with their latest products. While the target workloads havent changed, namely those using numerical simulations for fundamental scientific research, they have been supplemented by practical applications of HPC computational techniques and distributed systems to problems in numerous industries such as resource extraction, social networks, online marketing, cyber security and manufacturing.

Expanding the applicability of HPC to new industries and problems has created an environment that fosters tremendous innovation in many areas like processor architecture, workload-specific hardware acceleration, distributed software management and application development frameworks and libraries. Thus, a conference that was once dominated by Cray and later, custom distributed systems commissioned by government labs, is being disrupted by the likes of NVIDIA, Arm and the cloud vendors.

As is often the case, NVIDIA and its charismatic founder and CEO Jensen Huang aka the Worlds Top CEO are leading the innovative changes, making several significant announcements at SC19. In sum, they show a company that is one of the catalysts for this decades AI renaissance by fostering greater hardware diversity with workload-optimized system designs that substitute Arm processors for traditional x86 CPUs. Specifically, NVIDIA announced:

There is a renaissance in high performance computing. Breakthroughs in machine learning and AI are redefining scientific methods and enabling exciting opportunities for new architectures. Bringing NVIDIA GPUs to Arm opens the floodgates for innovators to create systems for growing new applications from hyperscale-cloud to exascale supercomputing and beyond.

While the SC19 announcements are focused on the HPC market and related applications, NVIDIAs latest moves are indicative of broader changes reshaping data center computing and application development that will eventually benefit mainstream enterprises. They are also indicative of growing acceptance of Arm as a data center platform and come amidst other evidence of significant improvements in Arm Server technology. Some examples include:

The newly energized market for data center Arm SoCs and systems would only be of passing interest to enterprise IT leaders if not for the existence of cloud services that interpose an API-centric abstraction layer between the developer/user and hardware implementation. Few organizations have the stomach for an architectural shift as fundamental to their enterprise software as changing processor platforms, even if it means saving money and hopping on a steeper performance growth curve.

Admittedly, most initial cloud offerings are IaaS compute instances that still expose the user to the processors architectural differences, however, even here, growing support for the Arm platform by Linux distros and software libraries and tools like NVIDIA CUDA-X eliminate major roadblocks to developers and IT operators. That said, given how secretive cloud operators like AWS and Google are about their internal workings, we have no idea how many services are already delivered from non-Intel hardware and whether new service features and performance gains result from their willingness to deploy hardware customized to the task. Chances are, they often are, particularly given comments from some of the Arm vendors like Ampere.

The real significance to enterprises of the news summarized here comes over the long term as the combination of vigorous hardware competition which fuels the proliferation of hardware like GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs designed for particular workloads means that the average business can access features and supercomputer performance levels that were once limited to the HPC priesthood in massive research labs. Indeed, the scale of what Microsoft can provide as a service is mind-boggling. Our friends at the Next Platform estimate that a maxed out NDv2 cluster delivers 5.36 petaflops of floating point performance, which would rank number 40 on the Top 500 list of the worlds supercomputers. All for a mere $2,661 per hour, versus the millions it would take to buy and operate such a beast. While an extreme example, it illustrates the tremendous democratizing force of combining cloud services with hardware competition.

Most organizations cant use a Top 500 supercomputer, but do have computationally intensive problems that can provide significant new business insights, but only be done on a new generation of AI- and HPC-optimized hardware; systems and services that can now be rented as needed. The combination of Arm servers, GPU and other accelerators and cloud services allow enterprise leader to unleash their creativity to solve previously intractable business problems.

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Arm servers attack cloud and HPC - here's why enterprises should care - Diginomica