Hello Everyone,
As we head into late summer and now looking towards school starting (or already have started in many places), we hope you have taken some time office and are ready for autumn. In the Ampere Community, we have taken some time off, and are getting excited for our next adventures. But let’s take a moment and look at what happened in July and August. Peter Pouliot spoke with Jack Aboutboul, FOSSY happened, new articles hit the Ampere Developer Portal, Ampere announced a new chip, and the community keeps growing!
Ampere One Released
You have probably heard by now that Ampere has released the AmpereOne. There was a lot of press about this 192 core, 128x PCIe Gen5 Lanes and DDR5 processor and a simple Google search will find those for you. We think that one of the better detailed reviews was done by Patrick Kennedy of ServeTheHome.
Conversation with Jack Aboutboul- Board Member, Alma Linux
Peter Pouliot, Developer Advocate for Ampere Computing, was fortunate to have a wide-ranging conversation with Jack Aboutboul. They talked about how Alma Linux and its community came together when Red Hat changed how CentOS would be supported. But Peter and Jack covered many other topics like how a new community takes over such a large code base and do builds and whether or not they will follow RHEL or forge their own path.
If you weren’t able to join Jack and Peter live, it was recorded, and you can watch it anytime. We do have to note that Ampere does not recommend that you touch the heat sinks on our servers. While they are much cooler than x86 ones, they still might be too hot to touch. Use a temperature gun instead. (See 19 min mark of the video) =)
We are looking to have more of these conversations. Let us know if you are interested in speaking or if you have a suggestion.
FOSSY
We had a great time up in Portland at FOSSY for our half day track. The track started off with Lance Albertson of the Oregon State University, Open-Source Lab talking about what it is like to run a data center and OSU’s open-source lab. He talked about how the servers are physically set up (cooling lanes) and the amount of energy needed. And when he plugged in his first Ampere Servers, he had to walk to the server room and manually check the usage because the numbers were so low.
Next up was Erik Benner, VP with Mystics working on Enterprise Transformations and an Oracle Director ACE. He talked about how Aarch64 devices had their origins in small devices and now vary from small 2 core postage stamp size chips, to the current servers where you can get 2 CPUs with 256 cores. Yet, they have a binary compatibility across all of them.
Aaron Williams, Developer Advocate with Ampere spoke about how you can save the world by switching server architectures. He highlighted the fact that with Ampere servers you can get more of them in a rack and more racks in a datacenter, thus increasing your compute power.
We ended the day with a panel discussion where we invited our speakers plus added in Andrew Kelly, President of the Zig Software foundation and Dave Neary, Director of Developer Relations at Ampere. The topics were wide ranging starting off with how to get started on Aarch64 and then ending 90 minutes later with questions about what is the best type of company for social good, a private one or a public one?
Once we get the links from the FOSSY organizers, we will post them in the community.
Community Highlights
Speaking of the Community, we just keep growing and growing. We know that it is the members that have enabled this. And as Jack Aboutboul said during his conversation with Peter Pouliot: “Can I give a shoutout to the AArch64 community? It is full of great people… if you are interested in AArch64, you need to be there.” And we couldn’t agree more. We are now averaging over 3,000 page views a month. The most popular topics currently are about the Ampere Developer Platform and Developer Kits and how people are using them. Another thread that is popular is about the RHEL changing their license. And the most popular topic of the month is about the release of the Ampere Porting Advisor.
The best thing you can do to help our community (or any community) grow, is to post on the community and spread the word. It is amazing the effect of a simple tweet or post on Slack can have.
Developer Center Highlights
And using the Ampere Porting Advisor as a segway, the Developer Center posted a blog by Pete Baker and Naren Nayak about the release of the Ampere Porting Advisor. This is a simple tool that will help you automate much of the migration of your code from your legacy x86 systems to your new Aarch64 systems.
We also have a new blog post by Jyothi Sreekumar titled How to Migrate to Ampere on OCI with Heterogeneous Kubernetes Clusters. Using OCI as its example public cloud, Jyothi takes you through how to migrate your stack, piece by piece, from your legacy system to your modern Ampere server.
Events and CFPs
As always, we end this with the events and CFPs that we have found. We do this because we want our community to be able to get out there and speak. Check it out here and let us know where you are speaking.