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Red Hat’s OpenShift Runs More Efficiently with Supermicro’s SuperBlade® Servers

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Red Hat’s OpenShift Runs More Efficiently with Supermicro’s SuperBlade® Servers

The Supermicro SuperBlade's advantage for the Red Hat OCP environment is that it supports a higher-density infrastructure and lower-latency network configuration, along with benefits from reduced cabling, power and shared cooling features. SuperBlades feature multiple AMD EPYC™ processors using fast DDR4 3200MHz memory modules.

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Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) provides enterprise Kubernetes-bundled devops pipelines. It automates builds and container deployments and lets developers focus on application logic while leveraging best-of-class enterprise infrastructure.

 

OpenShift supports a broad range of programming languages, web frameworks, databases, connectors to mobile devices and external back ends. OCP supports cloud-native, stateless applications and traditional applications. Because of its flexibility and utility in running advanced applications, OCP has become one of the go-to places that support high-performance computing.

 

Red Hat’s OCP comes in several deployment packages, including as a managed service running on the major cloud platforms, as virtual machines, and on “bare metal” servers, meaning a user installs all the software needed for the platform and is the sole tenant of the server.

 

It’s that last use case in which Supermicro’s SuperBlade servers are especially useful. Their advantage is that they support a higher-density infrastructure and lower-latency network configuration, along with benefits from reduced cabling, power and shared cooling features.

 

The SuperBlade comes in an 8U chassis with room to accommodate up to 20 hot-pluggable nodes (processor, network and storage) in a variety of more than a dozen models that support serial-attached SCSI, ordinary SATA drives, and GPU processor modules. It sports multiple AMD EPYC™ processors using fast DDR4 3200MHz memory modules.

A chief advantage of the SuperBlade is that it can support a variety of higher-capacity OCP workload configurations and do so within a single server chassis. This is critical because OCP requires a variety of server roles to deliver its overall functionality, and having these roles working inside of a chassis means performance  and latency benefits. For example, you could partition a SuperBlade’s 20 nodes into various OCP components such as administrative, management, storage, worker, infrastructure and load balancer nodes, all operating within a single chassis. For deeper detail about running OCP on the SuperBlade, check out this Supermicro white paper.

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Offering Distinct Advantages: The AMD Instinct™ MI210 and MI250 Series GPU Accelerators and Supermicro SuperBlades

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Offering Distinct Advantages: The AMD Instinct™ MI210 and MI250 Series GPU Accelerators and Supermicro SuperBlades

Using six nanometer processes and the CDNA2 graphics dies, AMD has created the third generation of GPU accelerators, which have more than twice the performance of previous GPU processors and deliver 181 teraflops of mixed precision peak computing power.

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AMD and Supermicro have made it easier to exploit the most advanced combination of GPU and CPU technologies.

Derek Bouius, a senior product manager at AMD, said “Using six nanometer processes and the CDNA2 graphics dies, we created the third generation of GPU chipsets that have more than twice the performance of previous GPU processors. They deliver 181 teraflops of mixed precision peak computing power.” Called the AMD Instinct MI210™ and AMD Instinct MI250™, they have twice the memory (64 GB) to work with and deliver data at the rate of 1.6 TB/sec. Both these accelerators are packaged as fourth generation PCIe expansion cards and come with direct connectors to Infinity Fabric bridges for faster I/O throughput between GPU cards -- without having their traffic go through the standard PCIe bus.

The Instinct accelerators have immediate benefit for improving performance in the most complex computational applications, such as molecular dynamics, computer-aided engineering, weather and oil and gas modeling.

"We provided optimized containerized applications that are pre-built to support the accelerator and run them out of the box," Bouius said. “It is a very easy lift to go from existing solutions to the AMD accelerator,” he added. It’s accomplished by bringing together AMD’s ROCm™ support libraries and tools with its HIP programming language and device drivers – all of which are open source. They can unlock the GPU performance enhancements to make it easier for software developers to take advantage of its latest processors. AMD offers a catalog of dozens of currently available applications.

Supermicro’s SuperBlade product line combines the new AMD Instinct™ GPU accelerators and AMD EPYC™ processors to deliver higher performance with lower latency for its enterprise customers.

One packaging option is to combine six chassis with 20 blades each, delivering 120 servers that provide a total of more than 3,000 teraflops of combined processing power. This equipment delivers more power efficiency in less space with fewer cables, providing a lower cost of ownership. The blade servers are all hot-pluggable and come with two onboard front-mounted 25 gigabit and two 10 gigabit Ethernet connectors.

“Everything is faster now for running enterprise workloads,” says Shanthi Adloori, senior director of product management for Supermicro. “This is why our Supermicro servers have won the world record in performance from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. three years in row.” Another popular design for the SuperBlade is to provide an entire “private cloud in a box” that combines administration and worker nodes and handles deploying a Red Hat Openshift platform to run Kubernetes-based deployments with minimal provisioning.

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AMD and Supermicro Work Together to Produce the Latest High-Performance Computers

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AMD and Supermicro Work Together to Produce the Latest High-Performance Computers

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Solving some of business’ bigger computing challenges requires a solid partnership between CPU vendor, system builders and channel partners. That is what AMD and Supermicro have brought to the market with the third generation of AMD's EPYC™ processors with AMD 3D V-Cache™ and AMD Instinct™ MI200 series GPU accelerators wrapped up in SuperBlade servers built by Supermicro.

 

“This has immediate benefits for particular fields such as crash and digital circuit simulations and electronic design automation,” said David Weber, Senior Manager for AMD. “It means we can create virtual chips and track workflows and performance before we design and build the silicon." The same situation holds for computational fluid dynamics, he added, "in which we can determine the virtual air and water flows across wings and through water pumps and save a lot of time and money, and the AMD 3D V-Cache™ makes this process a lot faster.” Without any software coding changes, these applications are seeing 50% to 80% performance improvement, Weber said.

 

The chips are not just fast, they come with several built-in security features, including support for Zen 3 and Shadow Stack. Zen 3 is the overall name for a series of improvements to the AMD higher-end CPU line that have shown a 19% improvement in instructions per clock, lower latency for doubled cache delivery when compared to the earlier Zen 2 architecture chips.

 

These processors also support Microsoft’s Hardware-enforced Stack Protection to help detect and thwart control-flow attacks by checking the normal program stack against a secured hardware-stored copy. This helps to boot securely, protect the computer from firmware vulnerabilities, shield the operating system from attacks, and prevent unauthorized access to devices and data with advanced access controls and authentication systems.

 

Supermicro offers its SuperBlade servers that take advantage of all these performance and security improvements. For more information, see this webcast.

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Queensland Educational Foundation Boosts IT Security with Supermicro Computers Using AMD EPYC™ CPUs

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Queensland Educational Foundation Boosts IT Security with Supermicro Computers Using AMD EPYC™ CPUs

In South Africa, the Queensland Education Foundation supports 11 different schools for the first 12 primary grades. In an effort to transform the region into a marquee digital environment, it has built a series of fully networked and online classrooms. The network is used both to supply connectivity and as a pedagogical tool to teach students enterprise IT concepts and provide hands-on instruction.

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In South Africa, The Queensland Education Foundation's legacy security infrastructure – including dedicated firewalls – was overloaded and operating at close to maximum capacity.

 

The Queensland Education Foundation (QEF) supports 11 different schools for the first 12 primary grades. In an effort to transform the region into a marquee digital environment, it has built a series of fully networked and online classrooms. The network is used both to supply connectivity and as a pedagogical tool to teach students enterprise IT concepts and provide hands-on instruction about their use. Combine that with the increased demands that COVID-19 placed on students to learn from home, the foundation needed to beef up its wide-area network with a higher-capacity fiber ring and better security software.

 

The Foundation's IT team went looking for a single-socket computer solution to simplify support, and conserve power and cooling requirements. This would be used to run the Arista Edge Threat Management software firewall and other security tools to protect their networks and help support student file sharing across the member schools.

 

The IT team experimented with an earlier Supermicro server to test the concept, "but it wasn’t powerful enough," said Johan Bester, one of the IT managers for the QEF. Eventually, the team selected the Supermicro A+ server powered by the AMD EPYC™ 7502 CPU with 128GB of RAM.

 

The server also contains four 10Gbps Ethernet switch ports to boost I/O performance. "With this server, we are able to offer our students a safe environment while encouraging collaborative projects among different schools," he said. The team was attracted to the A+ server because of its price/performance ratio. Plus, its specs met the foundation’s existing service level agreements while delivering increased functionality. The Supermicro system can also be used as a template that can be easily replicated across other South African school networks.

For more detail on Queensland Educational Foundation's adoption of Supermicro and AMD computing technologies, see the QEF case study on the Supermicro website.

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