SuperComputing all the way

Here it is Thursday at SC17 and I haven’t yet blogged.  This is due to the extreme number of meetings, which is fantastic!

This year, one of our competitors FINALLY decided to join us in commercial support for ARMv8a based systems, although, I must say their support seems a little lacking compared to ours since we support a wide array of silicon vendors and devices with our core Linux product with updated HPC packages and a scale-out storage environment with SUSE Enterprise Storage.

From the SUSE perspective, we’ve been supporting the 64-bit ARM ecosystem for quite a while.  This includes building QEMU support for ARMv8a into openSUSE a LONG time ago, well before hardware was available, so that developers could get working on enabling this up and coming architecture.  We’ve been quietly marching along enabling both server and more embedded use cases for the technology, including a released image of SUSE Linux Enterprise for Raspberry Pi a year ago.

The big news this week was official announcements from both Cray and HPE with full-blown systems for the HPC world.  The best news for you?  SUSE is already there with both of them.  Cray and SUSE have a long history together, and the same is true of HPE and SUSE, especially given the SGI acquisition that strengthened HPE’s HPC story.

Not only are these systems enabled with the base SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for ARM operating system, but they have the HPC module, included without additional cost with the OS subscription.  This means that SUSE customers are able to build clusters with confidence knowing that the packages are supported, thus eliminating the need to grab the source, build it, and troubleshoot issues on your own.

Another huge topic in the SUSE booth has been HPC as a Service.  We’re talking about it from many aspects, including on-premise using SUSE OpenStack Cloud with virtualization, containers, and bare metal, and in the cloud with any one of a number of SUSE’s CSP partners, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud.

For a few highlights of our great booth experience this year, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHGcQkd148M

I can’t wait to start planning for next year, see you in Dallas!