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Tech Explainer: Green Computing, Part 1 - What does the data center demand?

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Tech Explainer: Green Computing, Part 1 - What does the data center demand?

The ultimate goal of Green Computing is net-zero emissions. To get there, organizations can and must innovate, conducting an ongoing campaign to increase efficiency and reduce waste.

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The Green Computing movement has begun in earnest and not a moment too soon. As humanity faces the existential threat of climate crisis, technology needs to be part of the solution. Green computing is a big step in the right direction.

The ultimate goal of Green Computing is net-zero emissions. It’s a symbiotic relationship between technology and nature in which both SMBs and enterprises can offset carbon emissions, drastically reduce pollution, and reuse/recycle the materials that make up their products and services.

To get there, the tech industry will need to first take a long, hard look at the energy it uses and the waste it produces. Using that information, individual organizations can and must innovate, conducting an ongoing campaign to increase efficiency and reduce waste.

It’s a lofty goal, sure. But after all the self-inflicted damage we’ve done since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we simply have no choice.

The data-center conundrum

All digital technology requires electricity to operate. But data centers use more than their share.

Here’s a startling fact: Each year, the world’s data centers gobble up at least 200 terawatts of energy. That’s roughly 2% of all the electricity used on this planet annually.

What’s more, that figure is likely to increase as new, power-hungry systems are brought online and new data centers are opened. And the number of global data centers could grow from 700 in 2021 to as many as 1,200 by 2026, predicts Supermicro.

At that rate, data-center energy consumption could account for up to 8% of global energy usage by 2030. That’s why tech leaders including AMD and Supermicro are rewriting the book on green computing best practices.

A Supermicro white paper, Green Computing: Top 10 Best Practices For A Green Data Center, suggests specific actions you and your customers can take now to reduce the environmental impact of your data centers:

  • Right-size systems to match workload requirements
  • Share common scalable infrastructure
  • Operate at higher ambient temperature
  • Capture heat at the source via aisle containment and liquid cooling
  • Optimize key components (i.e., CPU, GPU, SSD, etc.) for workload performance per watt
  • Optimize hardware refresh cycle to maintain efficiency
  • Optimize power delivery
  • Utilize virtualization and power management
  • Source renewable energy and green manufacturing
  • Consider climate impact when making site selection

Green components

Rethinking data-center architectures is an excellent way to leverage green computing from a macro perspective. But to truly make a difference, the industry needs to consider green computing at the component level.

This is one area where AMD is leading the charge. Its mission: increase the energy efficiency of its CPUs and hardware accelerators. The rest of the industry should follow suit.

In 2021 AMD announced its goal to deliver a 30x increase in energy efficiency for both AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct accelerators for AI and HPC applications running on accelerated compute nodes—and to do so by 2025.

Taming AI energy usage

The golden age of AI has begun. New machine learning algorithms will give life to a population of hyper-intelligent robots that will forever alter the nature of humanity. If AI’s most beneficent promises come to fruition, it could help us live, eat, travel, learn and heal far better than ever before.

But the news isn’t all good. AI has a dark side, too. Part of that dark side is its potential impact on our climate crisis.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, illustrated this point by performing a life-cycle assessment for training several large AI models. Their findings, published by Supermicro, concluded that training a single AI model can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. That’s approximately 5 times the lifetime emissions of your average American car.

A comparison like that helps put AMD’s environmental sustainability goals in perspective. Affecting a 30x energy efficiency increase in the components that power AI could bring some much-needed light to AI’s dark side.

In fact, if the whole technology sector produces practical innovations similar to those from AMD and Supermicro, we might have a fighting chance in the battle against climate crisis.

Continued…

Part 2 of this 3-part series will take a closer look at the technology behind green computing—and the world-saving innovations we could see soon.

 

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AMD intros CPUs, cache, AI accelerators for cloud, enterprise data centers

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AMD intros CPUs, cache, AI accelerators for cloud, enterprise data centers

AMD strengthens its commitment to the cloud and enterprise data centers with new "Bergamo" CPUs, "Genoa-X" cache, Instinct accelerators.

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This week AMD strengthened its already strong commitment to the cloud and enterprise markets. The company announced several new products and partnerships at its Data Center and AI Technology Premier event, which was held in San Francisco and simultaneously broadcast online.

“We’re focused on pushing the envelope in high-performance and adaptive computing,” AMD CEO Lisa Su told the audience, “creating solutions to the world’s most important challenges.”

Here’s what’s new:

Bergamo: That’s the former codename for the new 4th gen AMD EPYC 97X4 processors. AMD’s first processor designed specifically for cloud-native workloads, it packs up to 128 cores per socket using AMD’s new Zen 4c design to deliver lots of power/watt. Each socket contains 8 chiplets, each with up to 16 Zen 4c cores; that’s twice as many cores as AMD’s earlier Genoa processors (yet the two lines are compatible). The entire lineup is available now.

Genoa-X: Another codename, this one is for AMD’s new generation of AMD 3D V-Cache technology. This new product, designed specifically for technical computing such as engineering simulation, now supports over 1GB of L3 cache on a 96-core CPU. It’s paired with the new 4th gen AMD EPYC processor, including the high-performing Zen4 core, to deliver high performance/core.

“A larger cache feeds the CPU faster with complex data sets, and enables a new dimension of processor and workload optimization,” said Dan McNamara, an AMD senior VP and GM of its server business.

In all, there are 4 new Genoa-X SKUs, ranging from 16 to 96 cores, and all socket-compatible with AMD’s Genoa processors.

Genoa: Technically, not new, as this family of data-center CPUs was introduced last November. But what is new is AMD’s new focus for the processors on AI, data-center consolidation and energy efficiency.

AMD Instinct: Though AMD had already introduced its Instinct MI300 Series accelerator family, the company is now revealing more details.

This includes the introduction of the AMD Instinct MI300X, an advanced accelerator for generative AI based on AMD’s CDNA 3 accelerator architecture. It will support up to 192GB of HBM3 memory to provide the compute and memory efficiency needed for large language model (LLM) training and inference for generative AI workloads.

AMD also introduced the AMD Instinct Platform, which brings together eight MI300X accelerators into an industry-standard design for the ultimate solution for AI inference and training. The MI300X is sampling to key customers starting in Q3.

Finally, AMD also announced that the AMD Instinct MI300A, an APU accelerator for HPC and AI workloads, is now sampling to customers.

Partner news: Mark your calendar for June 20. That’s when Supermicro plans to explore key features and use cases for its Supermicro 13 systems based on AMD EPYC 9004 series processors. These Supermicro systems will feature AMD’s new Zen 4c architecture and 3D V-Cache tech.

This week Supermicro announced that its entire line of H13 AMD-based systems are now available with support for the 4th gen AMD EPYC processors with Zen 4c architecture and V-Cache technology.

That includes Supermicro’s new 1U and 2U Hyper-U servers designed for cloud-native workloads. Both are equipped with a single AMD EPYC processor with up to 128 cores.

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Why your AI systems can benefit from having both a GPU and CPU

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Why your AI systems can benefit from having both a GPU and CPU

Like a hockey team with players in different positions, an AI system with both a GPU and CPU is a necessary and winning combo. This mix of processors can bring you and your customers both the lower cost and greater energy efficiency of a CPU and the parallel processing power of a GPU. With this team approach, your customers should be able to handle any AI training and inference workloads that come their way.

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Sports teams win with a range of skills and strengths. A hockey side can’t win if everyone’s playing goalie. The team also needs a center and wings to advance the puck and score goals, as well as defensive players to block the opposing team’s shots.

The same is true for artificial intelligence systems. Like a hockey team with players in different positions, an AI system with both a GPU and CPU is a necessary and winning combo.

This mix of processors can bring you and your customers both the lower cost and greater energy efficiency of a CPU and the parallel processing power of a GPU. With this team approach, your customers should be able to handle any AI training and inference workloads that come their way.

In the beginning

One issue: Neither CPUs nor GPUs were originally designed for AI. In fact, both designs predate AI by many years. Their origins still define how they’re best used, even for AI.

GPUs were initially designed for computer graphics, virtual reality and video. Getting pixels to the screen is a task where high levels of parallelization speed things up. And GPUs are good at parallel processing. This has allowed them to be adapted for HPC and AI workloads, which analyze and learn from large volumes of data. What’s more, GPUs are often used to run HPC and AI workloads simultaneously.

GPUs are also relatively expensive. For example, Nvidia’s new H100 has an estimated retail price of around $25,000 per GPU. Your customers may incur additional costs from cooling—GPUs generate a lot of heat. GPUs also use a lot of power, which can further raise your customer’s operating costs.

CPUs, by contrast, were originally designed to handle general-purpose computing. A modern CPU can run just about any type of calculation, thanks to its encompassing instruction set.

A CPU processes data sequentially, rather than in parallel, and that’s good for linear and complex calculations. Compared with GPUs, a comparable CPU generally is less expensive, needs less power and runs cooler.

In today’s cost-conscious environment, every data center manager is trying to get the most performance per dollar. Even a high-performing CPU has a cost advantage over comparable GPUs that can be extremely important for your customers.

Team players

Just as a hockey team doesn’t rely on its goalie to score points, smart AI practitioners know they can’t rely on their GPUs to do all types of processing. For some jobs, CPUs are still better.

Due to a CPU’s larger memory capacity, they’re ideal for machine learning training and inference, as long as the scale is relatively small. CPUs are also good for training small neural networks, data preparation and feature extraction.

CPUs offer other advantages, too. They’re generally less expensive than GPUs. In today’s cost-conscious environment, where every data center manager is trying to get the most performance per dollar, that’s extremely important. CPUs also run cooler than GPUs, requiring less (and less expensive) cooling.

GPUs excel in two main areas of AI: machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL). Both involve the analysis of gigabytes—or even terabytes—of data for image and video processing. For these jobs, the parallel processing capability of a GPU is a perfect match.

AI developers can also leverage a GPU’s parallel compute engines. They can do this by instructing the processor to partition complex problems into smaller, more manageable sub-problems. Then they can use libraries that are specially tuned to take advantage of high levels of parallelism.

Theory into practice

That’s the theory. Now let’s look at how some leading AI tech providers are putting the team approach of CPUs and GPUs into practice.

Supermicro offers its Universal GPU Systems, which combine Nvidia GPUs with CPUs from AMD, including the AMD EPYC 9004 Series.

An example is Supermicro’s H13 GPU server, with one model being the AS 8215GS-TNHR. It packs an Nvidia HGX H100 multi-GPU board, dual-socket AMD EPYC 9004 series CPU, and up to 6TB of DDR5 DRAM memory.

For truly large-scale AI projects, Supermicro offers SuperBlade systems designed for distributed, midrange AI and ML training. Large AI and ML workloads can require coordination among multiple independent servers, and the Supermicro SuperBlades are designed to do just that. Supermicro also offers rack-scale, plug-and-play AI solutions powered by the company’s GPUs and turbocharged with liquid cooling.

The Supermicro SuperBlade is available with a single AMD EYPC 7003/7002 series processors with up to 64 cores. You also get AMD 3D V-Cache, up to 2TB of system memory per node, and a 200Gbps InfiniBand HDR switch. Within a single 8U enclosure, you can install up to 20 blades.

Looking ahead, AMD plans to soon ship its Instinct MI300A, an integrated data-center accelerator that combines three key components: AMD Zen 4 CPUs, AMD CDNA3 GPUs, and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chiplets. This new system is designed specifically for HPC and AI workloads.

Also, the AMD Instinct MI300A’s high data throughput lets the CPU and GPU work on the same data in memory simultaneously. AMD says this CPU-GPU partnership will help users save power, boost performance and simplify programming.

Truly, a team effort.

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How Generative AI is rocking the tech business—in a good way

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How Generative AI is rocking the tech business—in a good way

With ChatGPT the newest star of tech, generative AI has emerged as a major market opportunity for traditional hardware and software suppliers. Here’s some of what you can expect from AMD and Supermicro.

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The seemingly overnight adoption of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT is transforming the tech industry.

A year ago, AI tech suppliers focused mainly on providing systems for training. For good reason: AI training is technically demanding.

But now the focus has shifted onto large language model (LLM) inferencing and generative AI.

Take ChatGPT, the AI chatbot built on a large language model. In just the first week after its launch, ChatGPT gained over a million users. Since then, it has attracted more than 100 million users who now generate some 10 million queries a day. OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer, says the system has thus far processed approximately 300 billion words from over a million conversations.

It's not all fun and games, either. In a new Gartner poll of 2,500 executive leaders, nearly half the respondents said all the publicity around ChatGPT has prompted their organizations to increase their AI spending.

In the same survey, nearly 1 in 5 respondents already have generative AI in either pilot or production mode. And 7 in 10 are experimenting with or otherwise exploring the technology.

Top priority

This virtual explosion has gotten the attention of mainstream tech providers such as AMD. During the company’s recent first-quarter earnings call, CEO Lisa Su said, “We’re very excited about our opportunity in AI. This is our No. 1 strategic priority.”

And AMD is doing a lot more than just talking about AI. For one, the company has consolidated all its disparate AI activities into a single group that will be led by Victor Peng. He was previously general manager of AMD’s adaptive and embedded products group, which recently reported record first-quarter revenue of $1.6 billion, a year-on-year increase of 163%.

This new AI group will focus mainly on strengthening AMD’s AI software ecosystem. That will include optimized libraries, models and frameworks spanning all of the company’s compute engines.

Hardware for AI

AMD is also offering a wide range of AI hardware products for everything from mobile devices to powerful servers.

For data center customers, AMD’s most exciting hardware product is its Instinct MI300 Accelerator. Designed for both supercomputing HPC and AI workloads, the device is unusual in that it contains both a CPU and GPU. The MI300 is now being sampled with selected large customers, and general shipments are set to begin in this year’s second half.

Other AMD hardware components for AI include its “Genoa” EPYC processors for servers, Alveo accelerators for inference-optimized solutions, and embedded Versal AI Core series.

Several of AMD’s key partners are offering important AI products, too. That includes Supermicro. It now offers Universal GPU systems powered by AMD Instinct MI250 accelerator and optional EPYC CPUs.

These systems include the Supermicro AS 4124GQ-TNMI server. It’s powered by dual AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors and up to four AMD Instinct MI250 accelerators.

Help for AI developers

AMD has also made important moves on the developer front. Also during its Q1 earnings call, AMD announced expanded capabilities for developers to build robust AI solutions leveraging its products.

The moves include new updates to PyTorch 2.0. This open-source framework now offers native support for ROCm software and the latest TensorFlow-ZenDNN plug-in, which enables neural-network inferencing on AMD EPYC CPUs.

ROCm is an open software platform allowing researchers to tap the power of AMD Instinct accelerators to drive scientific discoveries. The latest version, ROCm 5.0, supports major machine learning (ML) frameworks, including TensorFlow and PyTorch. This helps users accelerate AI workloads.

TensorFlow is an end-to-end platform designed to make it easy to build and deploy ML models. And ZenDNN is a deep neural network library that includes basic APIs optimized for AMD CPU architectures.

Just the start

Busy as AMD and Supermicro have been with AI products, you should expect even more. As Gartner VP Francis Karamouzis says, “The generative AI frenzy shows no sign of abating.”

That sentiment gained support from AMD’s Su during the company’s Q1 earnings call.

“It’s a multiyear journey,” Su said in response to an analyst’s question about AI. “This is the beginning for what we think is a significant market opportunity for the next 3 to 5 years.”

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Tech Explainer: How does Gaming as a Service work?

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Tech Explainer: How does Gaming as a Service work?

Gaming as a Service is a streaming platform that pushes content from the cloud to personal devices on demand. Though it’s been around for years, in some ways it’s just getting started.

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The technology known as Gaming as a Service has been around for 20 years. But in many ways it’s just getting started.

The technology is already enjoyed by literally millions of gamers worldwide. But new advances in AI and edge computing are making a big difference. So are faster, more consistent internet connections.

And coming soon should be a mix of virtual and augmented reality (VR & AR) headsets. They could bring gaming to a whole new level.

But how does GaaS work? Let’s take a look.

Cloud + edge = GaaS

GaaS is to video games what Netflix is to movies. Like Netflix, GaaS is a streaming platform that pushes content from the cloud to PCs, smartphones and other personal devices (including gaming consoles with the appropriate updates) on demand.

GaaS originates in the cloud. There, data centers packed with powerful servers maintain the gaming environment, process user commands, determine interaction between players and the virtual world, and deliver real-time results to players.

If the cloud is GaaS’s brains, then edge computing networks are its arms. They reach out to a worldwide base of users, connecting their devices to the gaming cloud.

Edge devices also keep things speedy by amplifying or, if necessary, taking over various processing duties. This helps reduce latency, the time lag between when a command is issued and when it’s executed.

Latency is especially detrimental to gamers. They rely on split-second actions that can make the difference between winning and losing. For them, lower latency is always better.

Device choice

GaaS is innovative at the user end, too. GaaS can interface with a wide array of client devices. That offers gamers far more flexibility than they get with traditional gaming models.

With GaaS, users are no longer tied to a specific gaming PC or console such as the Microsoft Xbox or Sony PlayStation. Instead, gamers can use any supported device with a decent GPU and a stable internet connection speed of at least 10 to 15 Mbps.

To be sure, some GaaS games—one example is the super-popular Fortnite—require a mobile or desktop app. But these apps are usually free.

Other cloud-based games are designed to work with any standard web browser. This lets a gamer pick up wherever they left off, using nearly any internet-connected device anywhere in the world.

Big business

If all this sounds attractive, it is. One of the first GaaS titles, World of Warcraft, is still active nearly 20 years after its initial launch. In 2015—the last time its publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, reported usage numbers—World of Warcraft had 5.5 million players.

Even more popular is Fortnite, introduced in 2017. Today it has more than 350 million registered users. In part, that’s because of the game’s flexible business model: Fortnite players can sign up and enjoy basic gameplay for free.

Instead of charging these users a fee, Fortnite’s developer, Epic Games, makes money from literally millions of micro-transactions. These include in-game purchases of weapons and accessories, access to tournaments and other gated experiences, and the purchase of a new “season,” released four times a year.

Super-popular games like Fortnite and World of Warcraft have help create a lucrative and compelling business model. This, in turn, has given rise to a new breed of GaaS tech providers.

One such operation is Blacknut, a France-based cloud gaming platform. Together with Australian outfit Radian Arc, Blacknut provides a GaaS digital infrastructure powered by AMD-based GPU servers designed and distributed by Supermicro.

What could go wrong?

Does GaaS have a downside? Sure. No platform is without its flaws.

For one, cloud gamers are at the mercy of the cloud. If a cloud provider experiences a slowdown or outage, a game can disappear until the issue is resolved.

For another, unlike a collection of game titles on physical media, GaaS gamers never really own the games they play. For example, if Epic decided to shut down Fortnite tomorrow, 350+ million gamers would have no choice but to look for alternate entertainment.

Internet access can be an issue, too. Those of us in first-world cities tend to take our high-speed connections for granted. The rest of the world may not be so lucky.

Future of GaaS

Looking ahead, the future of GaaS appears bright.

Advances in AI-powered cloud and edge computing will encourage game developers to create more nuanced and immersive content than ever before.

Faster and more consistent internet connections will help. They’ll give more power to both the bandwidth-hungry devices we use today and the shiny, new objects of desire we’ll clamor for tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s devices will surely include a mixture of VR and AR headsets. These could attach to other smart devices that enhance gameplay, like the interactive bodysuits foretold by movies such as Ready Player One.

GaaS will get smaller, too, as new mobile devices come to the market. Cloud-gaming titles, already a mainstay of mobile gamers, should be further empowered by next-generation mobile processors and faster, more reliable wireless data connections like 5G.

We’re witnessing the evolution of gaming as multiple clients interact with low latencies and high-quality graphics. Welcome to the future.

 

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What is the AMD Instinct MI300A APU?

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What is the AMD Instinct MI300A APU?

Accelerate HPC and AI workloads with the combined power of CPU and GPU compute. 

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The AMD Instinct MI300A APU, set to ship in this year’s second half, combines the compute power of a CPU with the capabilities of a GPU. Your data-center customers should be interested if they run high-performance computing (HPC) or AI workloads.

More specifically, the AMD Instinct MI300A is an integrated data-center accelerator that combines AMD Zen 4 cores, AMD CDNA3 GPUs and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chiplets. In all, it has more than 146 billion transistors.

This AMD component uses 3D die stacking to enable extremely high bandwidth among its parts. In fact, nine 5nm chiplets that are 3D-stacked on top of four 6nm chiplets with significant HBM surrounding it.

And it’s coming soon. The AMD Instinct MI300A is currently in AMD’s labs. It will soon be sampled with customers. And AMD says it’s scheduled for shipments in the second half of this year. 

‘Most complex chip’

The AMD Instinct MI300A was publicly displayed for the first time earlier this year, when AMD CEO Lisa Su held up a sample of the component during her CES 2023 keynote. “This is actually the most complex chip we’ve ever built,” Su told the audience.

A few tech blogs have gotten their hands on early samples. One of them, Tom’s Hardware, was impressed by the “incredible data throughput” among the Instinct MI300A’s CPU, GPU and memory dies.

The Tom’s Hardware reviewer added that will let the CPU and GPU work on the same data in memory simultaneously, saving power, boosting performance and simplifying programming.

Another blogger, Karl Freund, a former AMD engineer who now works as a market researcher, wrote in a recent Forbes blog post that the Instinct MI300 is a “monster device” (in a good way). He also congratulated AMD for “leading the entire industry in embracing chiplet-based architectures.”

Previous generation

The new AMD accelerator builds on a previous generation, the AMD Instinct MI200 Series. It’s now used in a variety of systems, including Supermicro’s A+ Server 4124GQ-TNMI. This completely assembled system supports the AMD Instinct MI250 OAM (OCP Acceleration Module) accelerator and AMD Infinity Fabric technology.

The AMD Instinct MI200 accelerators are designed with the company’s 2nd gen AMD CDNA Architecture, which encompasses the AMD Infinity Architecture and Infinity Fabric. Together, they offer an advanced platform for tightly connected GPU systems, empowering workloads to share data fast and efficiently.

The MI200 series offers P2P connectivity with up to 8 intelligent 3rd Gen AMD Infinity Fabric Links with up to 800 GB/sec. of peak total theoretical I/O bandwidth. That’s 2.4x the GPU P2P theoretical bandwidth of the previous generation.

Supercomputing power

The same kind of performance now available to commercial users of the AMD-Supermicro system is also being applied to scientific supercomputers.

The AMD Instinct MI25X accelerator is now used in the Frontier supercomputer built by the U.S. Dept. of Energy. That system’s peak performance is rated at 1.6 exaflops—or over a billion billion floating-point operations per second.

The AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator provides Frontier with flexible, high-performance compute engines, high-bandwidth memory, and scalable fabric and communications technologies.

Looking ahead, the AMD Instinct MI300A APU will be used in Frontier’s successor, known as El Capitan. Scheduled for installation late this year, this supercomputer is expected to deliver at least 2 exaflops of peak performance.

 

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AMD and Supermicro Sponsor Two Fastest Linpack Scores at SC22’s Student Cluster Competition

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AMD and Supermicro Sponsor Two Fastest Linpack Scores at SC22’s Student Cluster Competition

The Student Cluster Computing challenge made its 16th appearance at the SuperComputer 22 (SC22) event in Dallas. The two student teams that were running AMD EPYC™ CPUs and AMD Instinct™ GPUs were the two teams that aced the Linpack benchmark. That's the test used to determined the TOP500 supercomputers in the world.

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Last month, the annual Supercomputing Conference 2022 (SC22) was held in Dallas. The Student Cluster Competition (SCC), which began in 2007, was also performed again. The SCC offers an immersive high-performance computing (HPC) experience to undergraduate and high school students.

 

According to the SC22 website: Student teams design and build small clusters, learn scientific applications, apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures and compete in a non-stop, 48-hour challenge at the SC conference to complete real-world scientific workloads, showing off their HPC knowledge for conference attendees and judges.

 

Each team has six students, at least one faculty advisor, a sutdent team leader, and is associated with vendor sponsors, which provide the equipment. AMD and Supermicro jointly sponsored both the Massachusetts Green Team from MIT, Boston University and Northeastern University and the 2MuchCache team from UC San Diego (UCSD) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Running AMD EPYC™ CPUs and AMD Instinct™-based GPUs supplied by AMD and Supermicro, the two teams came in first and second in the SCC Linpack test.

 

The Linpack benchmarks measure a system's floating-point computing power, according to Wikipedia. The latest version of these benchmarks is used to determine the TOP500 list, ranks the world's most powerful supercomputers.

 

In addition to chasing high scores on benchmarks, the teams must operate their systems without exceeding a power limit. For 2022, the competition used a variable power limit: at times, the power available to each team for its competition hardware was as high as 4000-watts (but was usually lower) and at times it was as low as 1500-watts (but was usually higher).

 

The “2MuchCache” team offers a poster page with extensive detail about their competition hardware. They used two third-generation AMD EPYC™ 7773X CPUs with 64 cores, 128 threads and 768MB of stacked-die cache. Team 2MuchCache used one AS-4124GQ-TNMI system with four AMD Instinct™ MI250 GPUs with 53 simultaneous threads.

 

The “Green Team’s” poster page also boasts two instances of third-generation AMD 7003-series EPYC™ processors, AMD Instinct™ 1210 GPUs with AMD Infinity fabric. The Green Team utilized two Supermicro AS-4124GS-TNR GPU systems.

 

The Students of 2MuchCache:

Longtian Bao, role: Lead for Data Centric Python, Co-lead for HPCG

Stefanie Dao, role: Lead for PHASTA, Co-lead for HPL

Michael Granado, role: Lead for HPCG, Co-lead for PHASTA

Yuchen Jing, role: Lead for IO500, Co-lead for Data Centric Python

Davit Margarian, role: Lead for HPL, Co-lead for LAMMPS

Matthew Mikhailov Major, role: Team Lead, Lead for LAMMPS, Co-lead for IO500

 

The Students of Green Team:

Po Hao Chen, roles: Team leader, theory & HPC, benchmarks, reproducibility

Carlton Knox, roles: Computer Arch., Benchmarks, Hardware

Andrew Nguyen, roles: Compilers & OS, GPUs, LAMMPS, Hardware

Vance Raiti, roles: Mathematics, Computer Arch., PHASTA

Yida Wang, roles: ML & HPC, Reproducibility

Yiran Yin, roles: Mathematics, HPC, PHASTA

 

Congratulations to both teams!

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Choosing the Right AI Infrastructure for Your Needs

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Choosing the Right AI Infrastructure for Your Needs

AI architecture must scale effectively without sacrificing cost efficiency. One size does not fit all.

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Building an agile, cost-effective environment that delivers on a company’s present and long-term AI strategies can be a challenge, and the impact of decisions made around that architecture will have an outsized effect on performance.

 

“AI capabilities are probably going to be 10%-15% of the entire infrastructure,” says Ashish Nadkarni, IDC group vice president and general manager, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies. “But the amount the business relies on that infrastructure, the dependence on it, will be much higher. If that 15% doesn’t behave in the way that is expected, the business will suffer.”

 

Experts like Nadkarni note that companies can, and should, avail themselves of cloud-based options to test and ramp up AI capabilities. But as workloads increase over time, the costs associated with cloud computing can rise significantly, especially when workloads scale or the enterprise expands its usage, making on-premises architecture a valid alternative worth consideration.

 

No matter the industry, to build a robust and effective AI infrastructure, companies must first accurately diagnose their AI needs. What business challenges are they trying to solve? What forms of high-performance computing power can deliver solutions? What type of training is required to deliver the right insights from data? And what’s the most cost-effective way for a company to support AI workloads at scale and over time? Cloud may be the answer to get started, but for many companies on-prem solutions are viable alternatives.

 

“It’s a matter of finding the right configuration that delivers optimal performance for [your] workloads,” says Michael McNerney, vice president of marketing and network security at Supermicro, a leading provider of AI-capable, high-performance servers, management software and storage systems. “How big is your natural language processing or computer vision model, for example? Do you need a massive cluster for AI training? How critical is it to have the lowest latency possible for your AI inferencing? If the enterprise does not have massive models, does it move down the stack into smaller models to optimize infrastructure and cost on the AI side as well as in compute, storage and networking?”

 

Get perspective on these and other questions about selecting the right AI infrastructure for your business in the Nov. 20, 2022, Wall Street Journal paid program article:

 

Investing in Infrastructure

 

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Eliovp Increases Blockchain-Based App Performance with Supermicro Servers

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Eliovp Increases Blockchain-Based App Performance with Supermicro Servers

Eliovp, which brings together computing and storage solutions for blockchain workloads, rewrote its code to take full advantage of AMD’s Instinct™ MI100 and MI250 GPUs. As a result, Eliovp’s blockchain calculations run up to 35% faster than what it saw on previous generations of its servers.

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When you’re building blockchain-based applications, you typically need a lot of computing and storage horsepower. This is the niche that Belgium-based Eliovp fills. They have developed a line of extremely fast cloud-based servers designed to run demanding blockchain workloads.

 

Eliovp has been recognized as the top Filecoin storage provider in Europe. This refers to a decentralized blockchain-based protocol that lets anyone rent spare local storage and is a key Web3 component.

 

To satisfy the compute  and storage needs, Eliiovp employs Supermicro’s A+ AS-1124US® and AS-4124GS® servers, running quad-core AMD EPYC™ 7543 and 7313 CPUs and as many as 8 AMD Instinct™ MI100 and MI250 GPUs to further boost performance.

 

What makes these servers especially potent is that Eliovp rewrote its code to run on this specific AMD Instinct™ GPU family. As a result, Eliovp’s blockchain calculations run up to 35% faster than what it saw on previous generations of its servers.

 

One of the attractions of the Supermicro servers is the capability to leverage the high-density core count and higher clock speeds as well as the 32 memory slots. And it comes packaged in a relatively small form factor.

 

“By working with Supermicro, we get new generations of servers with AMD technology earlier in our development cycle, enabling us to bring our products to market faster," said Elio Van Puyvelde, CEO of Eliovp. The company was able to take advantage of new CPU and GPU instructions and memory management to make its code more efficient and effective. Eliovp was also able to reduce overall server power consumption, which is always important in blockchain applications that span dozens of machines.

 

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Microsoft Azure’s More Capable Compute Instances Take Advantage of the Latest AMD EPYC™ Processors

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Microsoft Azure’s More Capable Compute Instances Take Advantage of the Latest AMD EPYC™ Processors

Azure HBv3 series virtual machines (VMs) are optimized for HPC applications, such as fluid dynamics, explicit and implicit finite element analysis, weather modeling, seismic processing, and various simulation tasks. HBv3 VMs feature up to 120 Third-Generation AMD EPYC™ 7v73X-series CPU cores with more than 450 GB of RAM.

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Increasing demands for higher-performance computing mean that the cloud-based computing needs to ratchet up its performance too. Microsoft Azure has introduced more capable compute virtual machines (VMs) that take advantage of the latest from AMD EPYC™ processors. This means that developers can easily spin up VMs that normally cost thousands of dollars if they were to purchase their physical equivalents.

 

This story's focus is on two of Azure's series: HBv3 and NVv4. In most cases, a single virtual machine is used to take advantage of all its resources. High-performance examples of Azure HBv3 series VMs are optimized for HPC applications, such as fluid dynamics, explicit and implicit finite element analysis, weather modeling, seismic processing, and various simulation tasks. HBv3 VMs feature up to 120 Third-Generation AMD EPYC™ 7v73X-series CPU cores with more than 450 GB of RAM. This series of VMs has processor clock frequencies up to 3.5GHz. All HBv3-series VMs feature 200Gb/sec HDR InfiniBand switches to enable supercomputer-scale HPC workloads. The VMs are connected and optimized to deliver the most consistent performance. Get more information about AMD EPYC™ and Microsoft Azure virtual machines.

 

A Dutch construction company, TBI, is using the Azure NVv4 to run computer-aided design and building modeling tasks on a series of virtual Windows desktops. The NVv4 VMs are only available running Windows powered by from four to 32 AMD EPYC™ vCPUs and offering a partial to full AMD Instinct™ M125 GPU with memory ranging from 2GB to 17GB. Previous generations of NV instances used Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs that offer less performance.

 

TBI chose this solution because it was cheaper, easier to support and keep its software collection updated. Using virtual desktops meant that no client data was stored on any laptops, making things more secure. Also, these instances delivered equivalent performance, taking advantage of the SR-IOV technology.

 

Supermicro offers a wide range of servers that incorporate the AMD EPYC™ CPU and a number of servers optimized for applications that use GPUs. These servers range from 1U rackmount servers to high end 4U GPU optimized systems. Whether you’re using it on-prem or you’re building your own cloud, Supermicro’s Aplus servers are optimized for performance and technical computing applications and they run Azure and other systems well. Get more information about Supermicro servers with AMD’s EPYC™ CPUs.

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