SC19: Empowering SUSE HPC customers with expanded options | SUSE Communities

SC19: Empowering SUSE HPC customers with expanded options

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SC19, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis is just around the corner.  For SUSE, it’s a great opportunity to reconnect with customers and partners working in one of the sectors of our industry driving significant innovation in all aspects of computing.

If I tried to succinctly define SUSE’s message at SC19, it would be: “As with any journey, who you travel with is more important than the destination”.  In SUSE’s instance, customers and partners make up our travel companions.  In this journey, the customer is in the driver’s seat and elects the destination. Our role at SUSE is to empower HPC customers with choice across processor and GPU platforms as well as delivery options (on-premise, cloud, or hybrid).

SUSE eco-system for HPC: A review

When it comes to HPC, I tend to group SUSE’s contributions into three major categories:

  1. Delivery of supported, enterprise-class, software-defined infrastructure  based on open-source technologies. We enable customers to focus on what’s important: research, development and discovery rather than infrastructure administration, configuration, and deployment.

    SUSE Software-Defined Infrastructure Ecosystem

  2. Collaborate with the larger community across key projects and initiatives such as OpenHPC, OpenMP, and Ceph to name a few. Equally important though are our efforts to enable these tools on the SUSE software-defined infrastructure portfolio across multiple CPU/GPU family of products. 
  3. Engineering focus and upstream collaboration with key partner like AMD,Arm, Intel, and NVIDIA.  SUSE’s early engagement provides customers with access to some of the latest features and/or capabilities while implementing their on-premise, cloud, or hybrid solutions.

 

SUSE and Partners – Where Semiconductors and Software Meet

Working with key semiconductor vendors – whether it’s on the CPU or the GPU is fundamental to provide the customer with options. The result of this level of collaboration is leveraged across original device or equipment designers or manufacturers (ODMs and OEMs) as well as cloud solution providers (CSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs).

In the spirit of SC19, some highlights with key semiconductor providers:

  • Intel- Our partnership with Intel is one of the oldest in SUSE’s history. As Intel’s portfolio has expanded, so has our collaboration from OS enablement of processors, to networking, memory, storage and beyond.  Specific to SC19, there are particular areas that  I would like to highlight:
    • SUSE Enterprise Storage – Intel has been a strong supporter of SUSE’s effort around SUSE Enterprise Storage, our implementation of the Ceph open-source project. SUSE has some of the highest scores in the IO500 benchmark for a CephFS-based solution.
    • Intel’s announcement of a new category of GPUs based on the Xe architecture that is purpose-built for data center AI and HPC workloads.  We are excited for our collaboration with Intel to span architectures.
    • Intel’s announcement of the oneAPI initiative – As most of you may have read by now, Intel announced the publication of v0.5 of the oneAPI specification along with its own set of oneAPI Toolkits now available in beta.  As Bill Savage mentioned earlier in the year at Intel’s Software Technology Day in London “oneAPI is a project to deliver a set of developer tools that provide a unified programming model that simplifies development for workloads across diverse architectures”. (Full quote and article at: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intels-one-api-project-delivers-unified-programming-model-across-diverse-architectures/#gs.gapll0). SUSE anticipates ongoing collaboration with Intel around this initiative.

 

  • Arm – SUSE and Arm have been working together for some time as well.  SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Enterprise Storage have been available for the aarch64 architecture since 2016.  Interesting SUSE and Arm highlights include:
    • SUSE Linux Enterprise for Arm is available and supported on platforms from the likes of HPE and Cray leveraging Marvell’s ThunderX2 processor.  Lenovo Arm-based systems are available with Ampere Computing’s eMAG processor.
    • Catalyst UK – An initiative to propel Arm HPC ecosystem and Exascale computing in the UK.  It’s a joint collaboration effort between University of Bristol, University of Leicester, The University of Edinburgh, HPE, Arm and SUSE. More than 12,000 Arm-based cores deployed across the three universities with 64 Apollo 70 systems per site with SUSE Linux Enterprise for HPC (Arm) as the operating system.

 

  • NVIDIA – SUSE and NVIDIA have been collaborating for more than fifteen years when both companies identified the need to make the power of NVIDIA graphic cards available to SUSE Linux Enterprise-powered desktops and workstations.  Today, we work together in the HPC space with product-level cooperation ensuring NVIDIA GPU drivers as well as the CUDA parallel computing application platform are available on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.  We are also “fellow travelers” in communities focused on parallel and multi-platform programming models such as OpenACC and OpenMP.

 

  • Expanding customer choice – Arm, NVIDIA and SUSE – On November 18th, NVIDIA announced product availability of its GPU-Accelerated Arm Technology Preview.  SUSE is excited to support the availability of more GPU accelerators for the Arm platform and looks forward to general availability of CUDA and NVIDIA drivers for SUSE Linux Enterprise for Arm.

 

Stop-by, Stay Tuned, Learn More

If you’re attending SC19, stop by our booth (1917) and learn more about The Rise of SUSE HPC (it’ll be fun). We have stations with SUSE experts on HPC solutions, AI/ML,  storage and cloud.

And for everyone (attending or not), I encourage you to visit the following resources for more information:

 

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