ArmV8 support?

[rollmeister]

Is there any support for Ubuntu 16.04 on ArmV8 single board computers?
I have Orange Pi One Plus boards using 4 core Cortex-a53 cpu's.

[bruce]

Not at the present time ... and perhaps never.

The FAHClient code is only supported on Intel compatible CPU hardware ... including x86 but strongly preferring amd64. (There are MANY other platforms that could be supported, but relatively few devices would be donated -- insufficient to be worth FAH's development investment in porting the code or supporting an additional platform.)

There was an ARM client developed by Sony for their device, but support has never been good for devices from other manufacturers.

[rollmeister]

Thank you for the reply. Sounds like they are using assembly in the code then.

[bruce]

FAH analysis depends on two Open Source analysis packages, GROMACS and OPENMM. I'm not sure about Assembly in OpenMM, but a long time ago, the inner loops were coded in Assembly to unroll loops and maximize Floating Point hroughput and by densely packing / unpacking non-zero matrix elements into SSE registers. This code has been enhanced many times as new op-codes have been added to the Intel/AMD instruction sets. (The typical NxN matrix is rather sparse and can change over time, so it's an optimization that isn't readily handled by a compiler.)

Also, porting the code between Linux < - > Windows often introduces a number of complications. (Fortunately, OS-X <-> Linux is relatively easy). The cost of client development and support for 6+ versions goes up very rapidly if that number were to be increased and the increase in global FAH throughput would barely change.

[JimboPalmer]

Should you have a whale of a lot of free time, Sony open sourced their ARM code for phones. The compute part should move as ARM code, the interface part may need to be adapted from x86 Linux.