Odycloud newsletters (2024)

Data Exchange Program

Odycloud joined this spring the AWS Data Exchange program, which allows organizations to share large datasets in a quicker and more secure fashion than more traditional methods. This framework benefits both the team generating the datasets as well as any team or individual interested in any of their contents. The data are available in S3 buckets, which renders downloading latency very low. Odycloud is now making available air quality and meteorological forecasts for 2 regions: (i) northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada; (ii) western North America.

The air quality forecasts for the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada regions encompass 3.6 million sq km (1,390,500 mi2) and cover the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, the District of Columbia along with the southern regions of the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. The computations use a high-resolution grid and NRT satellite data to factor in wildfire emissions. 

The Western North America Air Quality Computations encompasses the states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Wyoming, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico along with the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan. This area -covering 3 million square miles or 7.78 million square kilometers- is affected by wildfires spanning from Canada to Southern California, and by high levels of pollution in the California and Great Basin regions. The starting date for the dataset is May 2024, which coincides with the beginning of the wildfire season when several large fires in Alberta led to very poor air quality conditions in a large region including the Edmonton metropolitan area. These Canadian wildfires have continued through the late spring/early summer months.

More information about the datasets is available at https://odyhpc.com/met-air-quality-simulations/.

ARM processors in the cloud

The early months of year were a particularly quiet time for server manufacturers with the two x86 architecture giants -Intel and AMD- expected to launch their new server generations in the coming weeks. A more fascinating scenario is unfolding for ARM servers as, after the AWS announcement of its new Graviton4 processor at the end of last November, Google and Microsoft recently disclosed that their new in-house ARM processors might become available before the end of the year. Due to the confidentiality of ongoing developments, it is difficult to point to exact dates and even many of the servers’ new features, but the following table provides a quick summary of what became available in the last year and our expectations for the near future based on public information:

 

ARM processors

Processor Name Design TeamDate(s)Family (ISA)Number of cores per socket
AmpereOne-1Ampere Computing May 2023A1-core (ARMv8.6+-SBSA5)136-180
Graviton3EAnapurna LabsJune 2023Neoverse-C1 (ARMv8.4-A)64
Graviton4Anapurna LabsAnnouncement (11/23)Neoverse-V2 (ARMv9)96
AmpereOne-2Ampere Computing2024 (Q3 or Q4)A2-core256
Azure CobaltMicrosoft2024 (preview Q3)Neoverse-N2 (ARMv9)96
AxionGoogle2024 (Q3 or Q4)Neoverse-V2 (ARMv9)Undisclosed

We anticipate the flow of details to increase in coming months with potential performance comparisons available over the second half of the year.