Building Sustainable Infrastructure and Edge solutions with SUSE and Arm

As global infrastructure is changing rapidly, developers are increasingly looking for the best environment to efficiently build and run their applications natively, whether it be on premises, in the cloud or at the edge. Arm, with its Neoverse portfolio, enables partners to deliver platforms with the speed, energy efficiency and performance per watt required to securely run optimized workloads in a sustainable computing environment. With open source and cloud native software being at the forefront of digital transformation, SUSE and Arm have built a close partnership to:

• Promote standards initiatives to enable partners to innovate. This includes platform standardization through programs like SystemReady and PSA certification, as well as segment specific initiatives like SOAFEE for automotive.
• Enabling SUSE Linux Enterprise product offering through collaboration with the openSUSE community to better support SUSE Linux for Enterprise, High-Performance Computing as well as at the Edge.
• Provide cloud native computing solutions with SUSE Rancher, leveraging Arm capabilities for AI/ML solutions whether in the cloud or at the Edge.

Building on standards

Standardization efforts greatly simplify development, reduce maintenance, and allow greater reuse. To better support innovation from partners, Arm launched the SystemReady initiative, defining standards for hardware and firmware so that operating systems like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro can run seamlessly across the range of partner platforms. SUSE has been a strong supporter of Arm SystemReady, and more recently Platform Security Architecture (PSA) certification level 1 was granted to SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro. SUSE also provides its own certification through the YES certification program, to ensure compatibility between hardware vendors platforms and SUSE operating system.

For the Edge and Automotive segments, Arm launched the Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) initiative, to which SUSE is part of the Technical Steering Committee. The aim of the project is to provide a reference cloud-native development and deployment framework while introducing functional safety, security, and real-time capabilities required for automotive workloads.

SUSE Linux Enterprise and Arm

Arm and SUSE have collaborated for over a decade, working with the openSUSE and upstream community to review architecture features so these can be validated and easily integrated into SUSE Linux products. Arm actively engaged with SUSE engineering efforts through the openSUSE community process as well as participating in SUSE Labs to exchange information about current and future technology developments.

Early collaboration with Arm was around High-Performance computing (HPC), with initiatives such as the HPE Catalyst UK program that SUSE participated in to foster early adoption of Arm for HPC. Things have come a long way for Arm since, in 2021, Fugaku the supercomputer developed jointly by RIKEN and Fujitsu claimed the top spot on the Top500 list. Recently, SUSE published benchmarks of application workloads at SC’22 such as Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) or molecular dynamics packages (GROMACS) on Ampere Computing Altra® Max processors, showing the cost/performance benefits of HPC deployments on Arm.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is also available on a range of Arm platforms such as Ampere® Altra® product family as well as with major public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and AWS, giving choice to developers to offload workloads to the cloud and take advantage of latest Arm hardware and functionality to improve performance and scalability and optimized TCO.

Deploying containers from the Cloud to the Edge

Companies and developers are increasingly adopting cloud native software and Kubernetes to automate deployments, scaling workloads, and perform management of containerized applications. The increased participation in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which now hosts over 150 projects and over 7 million cloud native developers according to the CNCF 2022 annual report. These are strong indicators of the digital transformation taking place. Arm and SUSE are both members of CNCF, working with the community and member companies to enable cloud native software to run and be deployed on multiple architectures, whether in the cloud or at the edge.

Arm and ecosystem partners are collaborating to enable deployments where performance and energy efficiency are critical whether this is autonomous vehicles, telecom equipment or IoT endpoints and devices. Arm provides choice delivering speed, energy efficiency and performance per watt required for resource constrained environments. Combined with SLE Micro and Rancher container management platform, SUSE provides a comprehensive solution to build, deploy, and scale containerized applications from the cloud to the edge to run AI/ML data processing for example.

From Products to Solutions

As customer infrastructure and applications support needs shift from product to solution, Arm and SUSE continue to expand their collaboration. Current efforts upstream in the adoption of open-source code or chipset-specific optimizations are done in anticipation of supporting comprehensive solutions in areas ranging from supporting converged infrastructure for hyperscale solutions all the way to the edge space in areas such as telecommunications, or Industrial IoT (IIoT) to name a few.

Visit Arm at SUSECON’23

Arm will be at SUSESON, June 20-22, 2023, in Munich. If you are attending, visit our booth to learn more about these topics, take an opportunity to have a conversation with us and join us for a talk about deployment of SUSE/Rancher on Arm infrastructure and check out sessions Arm is participating in.

For more information on Arm software ecosystem, please checkout Arm Developer Resources. You can also reach out to us directly on Twitter (@ArmSoftwareDev) or through email.