Catalyst UK: What we learnt from a three year program to invest in expanding the HPC software ecosystem for ARM based processors.

Back in the fall of 2017 HPE and Arm agreed to collaborate and provide funding and machines for three UK sites to receive three 64 node ARM based systems, with ARM based edge nodes, making the systems the only supplied homogenous ARM systems. Some 14months later the system were shipped and installed at The University of Edinburgh’s EPCC, The University of Bristol and The University of Leicester. The system were configured and made available to a myriad of scientists and system administrative specialists to determine how to extract the most of the new architecture. Not just science kernels, but also schedulers, files systems, software tools, and system management tools were all run, debugged, tuned, utilised, or discarded. As the three year program has now come to a close this brief talk is to promote the discussion around the learnings of deploying an ARM based HPC system and to answer the question “Are ARM based systems ready for commercial production supercomputing outside of the academic and research environment?”