This is my tenth #DaysOfArm article that tracks some of the experiences that I’ve had so far. And just to recap from the first post (here) on June 12 2021.
It’s been just over 2 weeks since the launch of Ampere Arm deployed in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Check this article out to learn more (here). And it’s been about one week since I started looking into the new architecture and deployment, since I started provisioning the VM.Standard.A1.Flex Compute Shape on OCI and since I started migrating a specific application that has many different variations to it to test it all out.
This is my next learning which I focuses on something deeper into the hardware stack – vectors.
Learning: There are many layers. And it all needs to line up.
I’ve mentioned this previously and that I’ve been working on standing up OpenRouteService (here) which is based upon OpenStreetMap (here). And what I found was that there are dependencies upon dependencies. I’m working on this … I’ve been able to get OpenRouteService up and running with the help of a pre-built PhantomJS and I’ve been expanding the ecosystem. And currently looking at Pelias – an opensource geocoder (here).
There as layers. Pelias relies on libpostal (here) for international address NLP and this is built in C and then bindings have been created for the other languages like Python, Ruby, Go, Java, PHP, and NodeJS. And part of this was some of the optimised code to do this work relied on Intel Intrinsics and Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE). (This is where my knowledge stops). I’ve yet to compile and work through this. I’ve been able to build this without SSE support. @TODO – See what the performance is like without it. Is it functional in a timely manner. I’m interested to know if this is something that would make a difference.
And again, this is why programs like the OCI Arm Accelerator (here) is important and is a way that Oracle Cloud is supporting the research and development on this platform. This program is open for anyone – corporates and individuals.
If you want to try this out yourself or work on your own application, sign-up (here) for the free Oracle Cloud Trial. I’d be interested to hear your experiences and learn from others as well. Leave a comment or contact me at jason.lowe@oracle.com if you want to collaborate.
There’s plenty of work to make this more achievable for everyone. And hence sharing this knowledge is the reason why I’m writing this series – #XDaysOfArm. I’ll keep documenting as long as I keep learning.
RedThunder.Blog 