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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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