Dear FLUKA Team,
Nowadays, the ‘aarch64’ architecture has become a significant part of the world’s computing power. It is used not only in small devices like tablets and Raspberry Pie, but also in powerful servers, for example, with Ampere Altra and AmpereOne processors. In recent years, this architecture has become a standard component of all popular Linux distributions, such as Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu, and so on. Unfortunately, the FLUKA binary for aarch64 is not yet available for Linux, although it is available for MacOS.
As part of the SAPHIR Millennium Institute (Santiago, Chile) our research group at University Andres Béllo (UANB, Chile) participates in CERN experiments. Packages like FLUKA, GEANT4 and POWHEG are actively used for simulations. GEANT4 and POWHEG were successfully installed on our server with Ampere Altra Max 128. Moreover, for some use cases, running these packages on this server shows better performance than, for example, an Intel-based server with dual CPU of comparable frequency (Xeon 6338), especially under heavy load on all CPU cores.
We know that our request for the ‘aarch64’ binary for Linux is not the first one. Last year at FKULA forum the reply on similar request https://fluka-forum.web.cern.ch/t/binary-libraries-for-gnu-linux-on-arm/5957 was as follows: “To provide for another architecture there should be a strong demand on it and we would need to heavily test it for the consistency of the results”. So, please, count this message as one of such “demands”. From our side we can suggest to FLUKA developers an access to our ‘aarch64’ server for FLUKA “heavy tests”.
With the best wishes,
Jilberto Antonio Zamora Saa
Yury Ivanov