Arm servers are here (to stay)
I’ve spent the last few weeks meeting with many customers and partners in Frankfurt at the ISC High Performance Conference, HPCast, and the GoingArm conference. We have worked with the Arm community for many years to build a 64-bit Arm server ecosystem. As a result, SUSE has delivered three releases of SUSE Linux for Arm. Now high end 64-bit Arm servers are finally coming to market.
Vendors such as Cray, HPE, Marvell, Qualcomm, and HiSilicon are working to deliver high end Arm systems for the HPC market this year. Last month, the HPE Apollo 70 became the first 64-bit Arm server to be SUSE “YES” certified. Customer are moving beyond the evaluation phase and are starting to place orders for systems. A key example of this is the recent Sandia National Lab announcement for the “Astra” HPC cluster based on HPE Apollo 70 systems running Marvell ThunderX2 Arm processors.
Meanwhile projects such as the arm Open Source Enablement Council, Catalyst UK, GW4, WorksOnArm (hosted by Packet), OpenHPC, and Linaro HPC SIG have been working to enable and validate open source software for Arm processor-based systems.
Mature 64-bit Arm systems for industrial, IoT, networking, and software defined storage workloads are becoming broadly available. These small but capable systems are delivered by ODMs (such as Gateworks) featuring Arm processors from Marvell, NXP, Rockchip, Xilinx, and others. SUSE customers are even using the Raspberry Pi Models B and B+ for industrial automation and monitoring.
Arm based systems are attractive for workloads other than HPC or IoT. Commercial applications are available for the Arm platform from vendors such as Cadence and even Microsoft.
Free developer subscription for SUSE Linux on Arm
SUSE is supporting the development of the 64-bit Arm ecosystem by expanding our free developer subscription program to include SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for Arm.
Developers can receive a free one-year, subscription that entitles you to receive fixes and enhancements for SLES on Arm operating system. SLES for Arm runs on many popular hardware platforms including the Marvell (Cavium) ThunderX2, Qualcomm Centriq 2400, and even the Raspberry Pi 3. You can use this subscription to test, validate, and qualify your solution for SUSE Linux for Arm.
How to get started
- Go to the download site https://www.suse.com/subscriptions/developer/
- Read the information and select Arm by clicking the “Arm AArch64“ link at the top of the page
- You need to be logged to the SUSE Customer Center to download the media. If you do not already have a SUSE login, you can create one now.
- The site generates a one-year subscription key. Please copy it and save it for later. This registration key is good for both SLES 12 and SLES 15 releases.
- Proceed to the download page where you will find images for SLES for Arm 12 SP3. If you need a later release like SLES 15 or you want to download the SD card image for the Raspberry Pi, go to https://download.suse.com/
- When you install SLES for Arm, you need to use the registration key created in step #4 above to download fixes and additional packages
Where to get help
You can engage with SUSE and other developers via the SUSE forums for Arm and Raspberry Pi
Now is the right time
Customers are looking for solutions that run on 64-bit Arm platforms. Now is the time for you to start making your application available on SUSE Linux for Arm by using the free Developer Subscription for SLES for Arm (including the Raspberry Pi).
Have a lot of fun!
The secret product manager 