English: Concocting the next big thing in high-performance computing (HPC) often starts with giving the latest thing a try. In that spirit, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) recently deployed Wombat, the center’s newest Arm-based test bed.

The 16-node, single-rack computing cluster is the OLCF’s latest foray into Arm technology, which Arm Holdings produces and openly licenses to hardware vendors. Last year, the OLCF, a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), deployed an early development system featuring Arm processors called Arm1.

Wombat, a prototype platform built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), features Cavium ThunderX2 processors designed for memory-intensive workloads. Additionally, the system contains 4 nodes equipped with AMD GPU accelerators. The test system arrived in January and began accepting users in May. Because the Cavium processors perform on par with other high-performance computing (HPC) processors such as Intel’s x86 and IBM’s POWER, researchers are keen to port their scientific codes to the new architecture and see the results.

+ Read the full story: www.olcf.ornl.gov/2018/08/07/olcf-welcomes-wombat-test-sy...