Open Edge and HPC Initiative

Global cross-industry players join efforts to support the ecosystem and market development for edge and high performance computing solutions

October 10, 2018 – Atos, E4, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Huawei, Mellanox, and SUSE announce their efforts furthering the development of an open and feature-rich ecosystem to support the evolving needs of the various industries undergoing digitalization and of all their respective stakeholders. This collaboration includes several relevant players, including both solution providers and key customers.

The targeted activities will help shorten time-to-market for Edge Computing and HPC deployments by developing and sharing solutions to improve interoperability and end-2-end integration. The industry players of this initiative will establish a common industrial development vision by which they collaborate on specific pathfinder projects to resolve practical deployment problems, identify concrete industry use cases, and contribute project results to reference deployments that will accelerate both Edge Computing and HPC innovations and industrial digitalization.

Currently, the pathfinder project funnel includes projects to deploy the necessary security features within the Edge Computing Platforms, the required performance KPIs to cover ultra-low latency-based platforms, as well as cloud infrastructure to secure an industry wide HPC server interoperability for ISVs. These pathfinder projects are currently planned by the above-mentioned industry players and are still open for participation by new project members.

The overall collaboration intends to contribute to the industrial 5G network deployments as well towards the data driven economy. Although the expected outcomes of this cross-industry collaboration is initially focused towards the European market, it will evolve to reach out globally.

The initiative welcomes collaboration with more partners who are engaged in the action of digitalization of industries, including the ICT industry, vertical industries and even the broader eco-system and value chain.

Quotes:

Mohamed Awad, Vice President of marketing, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm, USA
“Collaborative and grassroots initiatives focused on solving real world problems are the hallmark of a vibrant ecosystem. Addressing the challenge of supporting one trillion connected devices requires today’s infrastructure to evolve. Only the Arm ecosystem has the flexibility, scalability, and technical breadth to bring best-in-class solutions to market in areas as diverse as edge and high-performance compute.”

Jean-Marc Denis, Head of Strategy, BigData and Security, Atos, France
“We fully support the initiative to develop and support an open ecosystem to develop Arm-based solutions for HPC. As one of the three core partners of the Mont-Blanc Project, together with Arm and the Barcelona Computing Center, we’re assessing the potential of using Arm-based clusters to address exascale needs and we’re proud to help advance this with the first productized supercomputer to use Arm processors - our BullSequana X1310. We are also in charge of the European Processor Initiative, which as of today brings together 23 partners from 10 European countries. Our aim is to develop and bring to market a European low-power microprocessor that will be at the heart of the European exascale supercomputer effort.”

Fabrizio Magugliani, E4 Computer Engineering SpA, Italy
“The development of an ecosystem suited for the HPC environments and based on Arm technology is poised to change the future of supercomputing, providing scientists and engineers with optimized tools and utilities and opening up the path to innovative products and discoveries. E4 Computer Engineering, as a member of this initiative and in collaboration with key industry and government partners, is committed in creating an ecosystems and solutions that will accelerate the growth of the burgeoning Arm HPC ecosystem”.

Prof. Dr. Dirk Pleiter, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany
“For a leading supercomputing center like Jülich Supercomputing Centre the arrival of Arm-based solutions suitable for HPC adds exciting new opportunities on the path towards exascale performance levels. We are happy in supporting the formation of this industry led initiative with its focus on end-to-end solutions. The initiative has the potential to significantly contribute to broadening the market for these HPC technologies and creating a sustainable ecosystem“.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Magedanz, Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, Germany
“As an application-oriented research institute we are witnessing a strong demand for high performance, reliable and open edge computing platforms for 5G and Industrial IOT when talking to different vertical industries. This new global initiative gives us the opportunity to enable our German and European industrial partners to meet their business requirements enabled by edge computing in a faster and more economical way. We hope to see many more players joining the association in the near future.”

Guang (Winson) Lu, Business Unit IT, Huawei, China
“Huawei is committed to building a fully connected, intelligent world. Creating an open, collaborative and ever-improving Arm ecosystem will help us achieve this vision. The achievements of this initiative will enable us to provide more competitive Arm-based solutions to help customers accelerate digital transformation”.

Gilad Shainer, vice president of Marketing at Mellanox Technologies, USA
“Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet smart interconnect solutions enable the most efficiency and scalable high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, cloud, storage and other data center platforms. Joining efforts with the leading industry and academic partners will help ensuring the highest performance for Arm based solutions, and accelerate the development of software tools needed by the eco-system”

Phillip Cockrell - Vice President, Alliance Sales - SUSE
"SUSE is the first Linux provider to make standard support offerings available for 64-bit Arm solution providers and early adopters of Arm systems. Together with partner Huawei we are excited about supporting the next generation of HPC and Edge systems based on Arm to propel more innovation and digital transformation.”

Anprechpartner:

Prof. Dirk Pleiter
Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)
Phone: +49 2461 61-9327
E-Mail: d.pleiter@fz-juelich.de

Last Modified: 22.05.2022