What's New with Cavium's ThunderX2

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Cavium (News - Alert) Inc. is at the Supercomputing conference this week in Denver showcasing its ThunderX2 Arm-based server platforms for high performance computing.

Also this week, Cavium:

• put out a press release about how the Cray XC50 supercomputer is leveraging ThunderX2 processors,

• announced that GIGABYTE’s Arm server platforms based on ThunderX2 SoC technology are now available in production,

• promoted the fact that its technology helps power the new HPE Apollo 70 HPC platform,

• revealed that Ingrasys is now sampling rack-mount server platforms based on ThunderX2, and

• said ThunderX2 is interoperable with Microsemi’s (News - Alert) Adaptec HBA 1100 host bus adapter.

The Cavium ThunderX2 64-bit server SoC features fully out-of-order, high-performance custom cores supporting single and dual-socket configurations. Cavium says it delivers outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. And this solution, it adds, is supported by a broad software ecosystem.

Recently launched ThunderX2 processors include multiple SKUs for scale up and scale out applications. These processors are compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications, the Arm Server Base System Architecture, and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements standards.

At the show this week the company is demonstrating this solution along with its partners Bull/Atos, Cray, Gigabyte, HPE, and Penguin. The company is also pushing its Cavium FastLinQ this week in Denver. That’s a group of Ethernet adapters with Universal RDMA to support RoCE v1, RoCE v2, and iWARP. These adapters, Cavium says, are useful for data analytics, machine learning, and NVMe over fabrics storage applications.

Cavium also discussed ThunderX2 during various presentations earlier this week. And it will be part of a presentation today at 2:30 p.m. in the SUSE booth.

The semiconductor company, whose products are used in data center, enterprise, and wired and wireless network environments, also is using the Supercomputing conference as a platform through which to promote its involvement in various industry standards groups. Cavium says it’s involved with Linux Foundation (News - Alert) projects DPDK, OpenHPC, OPNFV, and Xe. It has contributed to Linaro's Enterprise and Networking Groups. It’s an active member of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum. And it sponsored the FreeBSD Foundation's Armv8 server implementation.