The forefront of GPU and CPU hardware development is for ARM based architectures. When investing in both workstations and server grade components, finding x64-compatible hardware that is compatible with CryoSPARC is getting harder and harder. This is particular noticeable for academic users who are using publicly funded HPC systems where the hardware architecture is decided by the lowest bidder. But todays academic user will be tomorrows paying industry users. If the open-source competition can be compiled on ARM systems, that is what they will be trained on using.
What are the plans from the CryoSPARC team to release a ARM64-compatible version of CryoSPARC?
Here is a non-comprehensive list of HPCs which provides CryoSPARC capability to their users:
| Canada |
Fir (Digital Research Alliance) |
| Finland |
CSC Puhti / Mahti |
| Poland |
Cyfronet AGH ā Athena |
| Sweden |
HPC2N ā Kebnekaise |
| Sweden |
NAISS / SciLifeLab ā Berzelius |
| Sweden |
LUNARC |
| Switzerland |
EPFL SCITAS ā Izar |
| Taiwan |
Academica Sinica Grid Comp. (ASGC) |
| United States |
Anvil (Purdue / ACCESS) |
| United States |
Caltech Central HPC |
| United States |
UConn Storrs HPC |
| United States |
Michigan State University ICER / HPCC |
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We at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland also provide CryoSPARC for our user on the A100 GPU nodes but are waiting for the ARM64-compatible version to take advantage of the GH200 Grace Hopper superchips.
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This has been brought up multiple times. I believe CS devs are aware of the issue, but as far as I know, no public statement has been made.
Here at Cyfronet, Athena is aging and newer cluster is also based on GH200.
Hi all, thanks for posting!
We have been doing some investigation into the feasibility of building CryoSPARC (worker at least) for ARM, and how our build, packaging, deployment, and update systems would need to be modified to handle multiple architectures. This work is ongoing on our end but unfortunately we cannot share any timelines yet. Thanks!
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Thank you Ali for confirming that you are looking into this. Of course, it is a major undertaking to adopt the code and the software development pipeline to a different architecture, but Iām sure your excellent team will have no problem accomplish that. Hopefully, you will get going on this with full strength as soon as release 5 is out of beta and that we can have a pre-release as soon as possible. As many have said, the GH200 system is probably the most relevant at the moment.