[Beowulf] If I were specifying a new custer...

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2018 09:24:18 +0100, you wrote:

>I think the ARM/Cavium Thunder is going to see a lot of attention.
>I saw a report recently from the Bristol/Cray Brunel cluster - they are
>offering a range of chemistry codes and OpenFOAM,
>compiled up for ARM.
>Poke me and I will search for the report - I saw it on a twitter feed.

ARM essentially has 2 problems.

One, you go from cheap/limited SOC boards like the Raspberry Pi and
jump straight into the expensive Cavium line.  There is no affordable
ARM option for developers to use painfree to write code, port code,
and test code.

If ARM, or Power, want to move from their current positions in the
market they really need to provide affordable developer machines,
machines priced at a point where the open source community can justify
buying it as a secondary machine to work on making the Linux
distributions more solid and the associated software.

Two, for whatever reason the only company that seems to be able to
produce ARM processors with decent peformance is Apple, and they
aren't giving up their advantage.  Microsoft would like to move into
the ARM based notebook market but so far Qualcomm doesn't seem to be
able to provide a chip with adequate performance.  The ARM ecosystem
needs to do much better at converting the ARM designs into actual
hardware.

>Regarding the Intel Fab issues, what is the public evidence for this?
>I guess there may be a lot of industry scuttlebutt around.

Earning reports, stock downgrades, prices.

Intel is having serious issues moving from 14nm to 10nm, is  3 years
late and now saying sometime in 2019, and is having supply issues
given they have fabs unable to supply product as the conversion
continues to be extended.