ARM extends HPC offering with acquisition of Allinea Software | Hacker News Reader

ARM extends HPC offering with acquisition of Allinea Software

arm.com

70 pointsdrydot19 comments

I got my first dev job after Uni at the sister company to Allinea, so I know and have had a beer or three with most of the people involved.

Will admit to having worked near them for nearly 2 years and still not understanding fully what they do (a cloud distributed debugger for HPC workloads, iirc) but I can tell you this isn't a unicorn growth startup -- they've been working hard on this for over a decade.

Congrats all!

Thanks! It's been an incredible journey ;-)

One of the less obvious benefits of joining ARM is having extra sites to recruit developers at. Adding Manchester and potentially Cambridge to the existing two sites is cool.

>It's been an incredible journey

oh, so they are firing all of you and shutting down the company?

Warwick and TN still? ;)

I worked at Concurrent (now Concertim) with Ben A/Mark T/Gordon C a while back. Good memories.

Allinea product manager and ex debugger dev here, ARM is very serious about the server market and this is a small part of that larger plan.

I was surprised and pleased to see us on Hacker News - happy to answer any questions!

Can someone tell me what Allinea does? What does providing software for HPC mean?

Their web site might give a clue that they produce a parallel debugger and profiler integrated with an (Eclipse PPT-like?) GUI. The debugger is based on launching instances of gdb (which isn't trivial at scale).

More to the point, can someone tell me why I should use the profiler rather than the free/gratis tools, like TAU? Their salesman couldn't.

While a full parallel debugger is clearly useful in difficult cases, easily the most useful debugging tool is stack traces, perhaps from openmpi's automatic backtrace or LLNL's STAT. I don't know whether Totalview (proprietary alternative to DDT) was ever seriously used when we had it available to a multi-site project.

From what I recall of prices, if you're going to buy the tools for more cores than on the sort of single node we have, you're talking something like my salary. Then, in practice most university users won't measure or debug anyway, and may not accept deadlock as a concept when systems people do.

With reluctance, since you ask TAU is a great tool for performance experts but few scientists have the expertise to use it. MAP is designed for them.

Plus the multi-core support is damn cool.

slightly less editorialized from Top500 news: https://www.top500.org/news/arm-buys-hpc-software-toolmaker-...

"More than £18m": http://www.insidermedia.com/insider/midlands/mercia-exits-wa...

HPC = High Performance Computing

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/definition/high-...

Good on you. I was a bit shocked that ARM left that uninterpreted on their website; poor manners if nothing else.

The linked article's headline,

>ARM extends HPC offering with acquisition of software tools provider Allinea Software

is not editorialized at all. OP, are you a marketing person for ARM?

Well, what else would they spend the coin for? So they could have bigger pizza parties?

Also compare word count.

Reminds me a lot of Nvidia buying Portland Group, although that was probably a better match. I don't really see this making much difference - what AMD needs in HPC is tooling for their GPU/APU that covers a wide range of usecases, is stable and performant. Publications and then sales pretty much follow automatically, but IMO so far the tooling was the missing element. E.g. where's my Fortran API for OpenCL and Nvidia? How do I debug and profile this? What about device memory aware MPI wrappers? BLAS on device? Etc.

Allinea AFAIK only helps with the debugging/profiling part - but first you need a sensible programming model.

This is about ARM, not AMD.

Dangit, so much news about AMD lately ;). Funnily enough my comment still applies (I think).

I think they know this, e.g. they opened a new office in Manchester (UK), and LinkedIn suggests the location is for HPC and tooling.

I'm guessing Allinea makes sense as they're also in the UK. It might be an acquihire thing, instead of specific tooling. The Manchester location took a while to set up, it's still growing and still looking for people, meanwhile I think they're moving to new offices. Talent can be a bit limited in the UK, especially outside of London (and after Brexit).

TL;DR: good chance of acquihire

Indeed, "no difference." ARM's rational seems to be that the purchase insures that there remains no difference in support for their products.

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