In this issue

• ASTRA – A Large Scale ARM64 HPC Deployment (2019 Stanford HPC)
• Neoverse N1 (Linley Group) (subscription required)
• k3s – minimalist Kubernetes from Rancher Labs
• Apache Bigtop on aarch64 via ODPi (Linaro Connect Bangkok)
• Project Photon OS update (VMware)
• Civil Infrastructure Platform (Linux Foundation)

ASTRA – A Large Scale ARM64 HPC Deployment (2019 Stanford HPC)

Michael Aguilar from Sandia National Laboratories presents: ASTRA – A Large Scale ARM64 HPC Deployment in this presentation from the 2019 Stanford HPC Conference. The Arm-based system will be used by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for simulation and modeling workloads.

• InsideHPC
• Michael Aguilar presentation at 2019 Stanford HPC video, Youtube
• Michael Aguilar presentation at 2019 Stanford HPC slides, Slideshare

Neoverse N1 (Linley Group) (subscription required)

Linley Gwennap writes about the new Neoverse N1 in the Linley Group’s newsletter (subscription required). Arm is “upping its server game”, but “[D]espite the new brand, the N1 is similar to the recent Cortex-A76 smartphone CPU.” The report notes that a 64-core reference design outperforms Intel’s mainstream Xeon processors.

• Linley Group: Neoverse N1

k3s – minimalist Kubernetes from Rancher Labs

k3s is a lightweight and minimal Kubernetes distribution from Rancher Labs. It is built for the edge, with an emphasis on removing unneeded functions and features and simplifying binary distributions down to a single executable that will fit in a memory footprint as small as 512 MB. k3s will run on 32-bit and 64-bit Arm systems, as well as x86 systems.

k3s is the subject of an upcoming Rancher Meetup discussion and live demo on Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, hosted by Rancher co-founders Shannon Williams and Darren Shepherd.

• https://k3s.io/
• Introducing k3s, Rancher
• k3s source code, Github
• Hacker News story
• k3s meetup announcement
• Rancher Labs on Twitter

Apache Bigtop on aarch64 via ODPi (Linaro Connect Bangkok)

Apache Bigtop is a project for the development of packaging and tests of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. ODPi, a non-profit focused on the Hadoop ecosystem, will present on the current state of the big data software universe at Linaro Connect in Bangkok the week of April 1, 2019.

• ODPi at Linaro Connect Bangkok, ODPi
• Apache Bigtop sources, Github mirror
• https://www.odpi.org/

Project Photon OS update (VMware)

Project Photon is a minimal lightweight Linux distribution designed for containers and cloud native technology. In a Photon 3.0 release, the project adds support for arm64 systems and for the Raspberry Pi. Photon OS is a project of VMware’s Open Source team.

• Project Photon OS update, VMware
• @vmwopensource, Twitter

Civil Infrastructure Platform (Linux Foundation)

The Civil Infrastructure Platform is a Linux Foundation project aimed at “establishing an open source base layer of industrial grade software to enable the use and implementations of reusable software building blocks that meet the safety, reliability and other requirements of industrial and civil infrastructure.”

A new reference platform adds “super long term support” (SLTS) for the Linux kernel, aiming at implmentations that will be fielded for 10 years. Renesas has contributed both a reference hardware design and arm64 support for this kernel, which is based on Linux 4.19.

• https://www.cip-project.org/
• SLTS Kernel announcement (press release), Linux Foundation