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Need help turning your customers’ data into actionable insights?

Your customers already have plenty of data. What they need now are insights. Supermicro, AMD and Cloudera are here to help.

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Your customers already have plenty of data. What they need now are insights.

Data just sits there, taking up costly storage and real estate. But actionable insights can help your customers strengthen their overall business, improve their business processes, and create new products and services.

Increasingly, these insights are based on data captured at the edge. For example, a retailer might collect customer and sales data using the point-of-sale terminals in its stores.

Supermicro is here to help. Its edge systems, including the latest WIO and short-depth servers powered by AMD processors, have been designed to collect data at the business edge.

These servers are powered by AMD’s EPYC 8004 Series processors. Introduced in September, these CPUs extend the company’s ‘Zen4c’ architecture into lower-core-count processors designed for edge servers and form factors.

GrandTwin too

For more insights, tell your customers to check out Supermicro’s GrandTwin servers. They’re powered by AMD EPYC 9004 processors and can run Cloudera Data Flow (CDF), a scalable, real-time streaming analytics platform.

The Supermicro GrandTwin systems provide a multi-node rackmount platform for cloud data centers. They come in 2U with 4 nodes for optimal deployment.

These systems offer AMD’s 4th Gen EPYC 9004 Series of general-purpose processors, which support DDR-5 4800 memory and PCI Express Gen 5 I/O.

Distributed yet united

If you’re unfamiliar with Cloudera, the company’s approach is based on a simple idea: single clouds are passé. Instead, Cloudera supports a hybrid data platform, one that can be used with any cloud, any analytics and any data.

The company’s idea is that data-management components should be physically distributed, but treated as a cohesive whole with AI and automation.

Cloudera’s CDF solution ingests, curates and analyzes data for key insights and immediate actionable information. That can include issues or defects that need remediating. And AI and machine learning systems can use the data to suggest real-time improvements.

More specifically, CDF delivers flow management, edge management, streams processing, streams management, and streaming analytics.

The upshot: Your customers need actionable insights, not more data. And to get those insights, they can check out the powerful combination of Supermicro servers, AMD processors and Cloudera solutions.

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Can liquid-cooled servers help your customers?

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Can liquid-cooled servers help your customers?

Liquid cooling can offer big advantages over air cooling. According to a new Supermicro solution guide, these benefits include up to 92% lower electricity costs for a server’s cooling infrastructure, and up to 51% lower electricity costs for an entire data center.

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The previous thinking was that liquid cooling was only for supercomputers and high-end gaming PCs. No more.

Today, many large-scale cloud, HPC, analytics and AI servers combine CPUs and GPUs in a single enclosure, generating a lot of heat. Liquid cooling can carry away the heat that’s generated, often with less overall cost and more efficiently than air.

According to a new Supermicro solution guide, liquid’s advantages over air cooling include:

  • Up to 92% lower electricity costs for a server’s cooling infrastructure
  • Up to 51% lower electricity costs for the entire data center
  • Up to 55% less data center server noise

What’s more, the latest liquid cooling systems are turnkey solutions that support the highest GPU and CPU densities. They’re also fully validated and tested by Supermicro under demanding workloads that stress the server. And unlike some other components, they’re ready to ship to you and your customers quickly, often in mere weeks.

What are the liquid-cooling components?

Liquid cooling starts with a cooling distribution unit (CDU). It incorporates two modules: a pump that circulates the liquid coolant, and a power supply.

Liquid coolant travels from the CDU through flexible hoses to the cooling system’s next major component, the coolant distribution manifold (CDM). It’s a unit with distribution hoses to each of the servers.

There are 2 types of CDMs. A vertical manifold is placed on the rear of the rack, is directly connected via hoses to the CDU, and delivers coolant to another important component, the cold plates. The second type, a horizontal manifold, is placed on the front of the rack, between two servers; it’s used with systems that have inlet hoses on the front.

The cold plates, mentioned above, are placed on top of the CPUs and GPUs in place of their typical heat sinks. With coolant flowing through their channels, they keep these components cool.

Two valuable CDU features are offered by Supermicro. First, the company’s CDU has a cooling capacity of 100kW, which enables very high rack compute densities. Second, Supermicro’s CDU features a touchscreen for monitoring and controlling the rack operation via a web interface. It’s also integrated with the company’s Super Cloud Composer data-center management software.

What does it work on?

Supermicro offers several liquid-cooling configurations to support different numbers of servers in different size racks.

Among the Supermicro servers available for liquid cooling is the company’s GPU systems, which can combine up to eight Nvidia GPUs and AMD EPYC 9004 series CPUs. Direct-to-chip (D2C) coolers are mounted on each processor, then routed through the manifolds to the CDU. 

D2C cooling is also a feature of the Supermicro SuperBlade. This system supports up to 20 blade servers, which can be powered by the latest AMD EPYC CPUs in an 8U chassis. In addition, the Supermicro Liquid Cooling solution is ideal for high-end AI servers such as the company’s 8-GPU 8125GS-TNHR.

To manage it all, Supermicro also offers its SuperCloud Composer’s Liquid Cooling Consult Module (LCCM). This tool collects information on the physical assets and sensor data from the CDU, including pressure, humidity, and pump and valve status.

This data is presented in real time, enabling users to monitor the operating efficiency of their liquid-cooled racks. Users can also employ SuperCloud Composer to set up alerts, manage firmware updates, and more.

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Tech Explainer: Green Computing, Part 3 – Why you should reduce, reuse & recycle

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Tech Explainer: Green Computing, Part 3 – Why you should reduce, reuse & recycle

The new 3Rs of green computing are reduce, reuse and recycle. 

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To help your customers meet their environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals, it pays to focus on the 3 Rs of green computing—reduce, reuse and recycle.

Sure, pursuing these goals can require some additional R&D and reorganization. But tech titans such as AMD and Supermicro are helping.

AMD, Supermicro and their vast supply chains are working to create a new virtuous circle. More efficient tech is being created using recycled materials, reused where possible, and then once again turned into recycled material.

For you and your customers, the path to green computing can lead to better corporate citizenship as well as higher efficiencies and lower costs.

Green server design

New disaggregated server technology is now available from manufacturers like Supermicro. This tech makes it possible for organizations of every size to increase their energy efficiency, better utilize data-center space, and reduce capital expenditures.

Supermicro’s SuperBlade, BigTwin and EDSFF SuperStorage are exemplars of disaggregated server design. The SuperBlade multi-node server, for instance, can house up to 20 server blades and 40 CPUs. And it’s available in 4U, 6U and 8U rack enclosures.

These efficient designs allow for larger, more efficient shared fans and power supplies. And along with the chassis itself, many elements can remain in service long past the lifespans of the silicon components they facilitate. In some cases, an updated server blade can be used in an existing chassis.

Remote reprogramming

Innovative technologies like adaptive computing enable organizations to adopt a holistic approach to green computing at the core, the edge and in end-user devices.

For instance, AMD’s adaptive computing initiative offers the ability to optimize hardware based on applications. Then your customers can get continuous updates after production deployment, adapting to new requirements without needing new hardware.

The key to adaptive computing is the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). It’s essentially a blank canvas of hardware, capable of being configured into a multitude of different functions. Even after an FPGA has been deployed, engineers can remotely access the component to reprogram various hardware elements.

The FPGA reprogramming process can be as simple as applying security patches and bug fixes—or as complex as a wholesale change in core functionality. Either way, the green computing bona fides of adaptive computing are the same.

What’s more, adaptive tech like FPGAs significantly reduces e-waste. This helps to lower an organization’s overall carbon footprint by obviating the manufacturing and transportation necessary to replace hardware already deployed.

Adaptive computing also enables organizations to increase energy efficiency. Deploying cutting-edge tech like the AMD Instinct MI250X Accelerator to complete AI training or inferencing can significantly reduce the overall electricity needed to complete a task.

Radical recycling

Even in organizations with the best green computing initiatives, elements of the hardware infrastructure will eventually be ready for retirement. When the time comes, these organizations have yet another opportunity to go green—by properly recycling.

Some servers can be repurposed for other, less-demanding tasks, extending their lifespan. For example, a system that had been used for HPC applications that may no longer have the required FP64 performance could be repurposed to host a database or email application.

Quite a lot of today’s computer hardware can be recycled. This includes glass from monitors; plastic and aluminum from cases; copper in power supplies; precious metals used in circuitry; even the cardboard, wood and other materials used in packaging.

If that seems like too much work, there are now third-party organizations that will oversee your customers’ recycling efforts for a fee. Later, if all goes according to plan, these recycled materials will find their way back into the manufacturing supply chain.

Tech suppliers are working to make recycling even easier. For example, AMD is one of the many tech leaders whose commitment to environmental sustainability extends across its entire value chain. For AMD, that includes using environmentally preferable packing materials, such as recycled materials and non-toxic dyes.

Are you 3R?

Your customers understand that establishing and adhering to ESG goals is more than just a good idea. In fact, it’s vital to the survival of humanity.

Efforts like those of AMD and Supermicro are helping to establish a green computing revolution—and not a moment too soon.

In other words, pursuing green computing’s 3 Rs will be well worth the effort.

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Tech Explainer: Green Computing, Part 2 — Holistic strategies

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Tech Explainer: Green Computing, Part 2 — Holistic strategies

Holistic green computing strategies can help both corporate and individual users make changes for the better.

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Green computing allows us to align the technology that powers our lives with the sustainability goals necessary to battle the climate crisis.

In Part 1 of our Tech Explainer on green computing, we looked at data-center architecture best practices and component-level green engineering. Now we’ll investigate holistic green computing strategies that can help both corporate and individual users change for the better.

Green manufacturing and supply chain

The manufacturing process can account for up to 70% of the natural resources used in the lifecycle of a PC, server or other digital device. And an estimated 76% of all global trade passes through a supply chain. So it’s more important than ever to reform processes that could harm the environment.

AMD’s efforts to advance environmental sustainability in partnership with its suppliers is a step in the right direction. The AMD Supply Chain is currently on track to ensure two important goals: that 80% of its suppliers source renewable energy, and that 100% make public their emissions-reduction goals, both by 2025.

To reduce the environmental impact of IT manufacturing, tech providers are replacing the toxic chemicals used in computer manufacturing with alternatives that are more environmentally friendly.

Materials such as the brominated flame retardants found in plastic casings are giving way to eco-friendly, non-toxic silicone compounds. Traditional non-recyclable plastic parts are being replaced by parts made from both bamboo and recyclable plastics, such as polycarbonate resins. And green manufacturers are working to eliminate other toxic chemicals, including lead in solder and cadmium and selenium in circuit boards.

Innovation in green manufacturing can identify and improve hundreds, if not thousands, of industry-standard practices. No matter how small an improvement is when employed to create millions of devices, it can make a big difference.

Green enterprise

Today’s enterprise data-center managers are working to maximize server performance while also minimizing their environmental impact. Leading-edge green methodologies include two important moves: reducing power usage at the server level and extending hardware lifecycles to create less waste.

Supermicro, an authority on energy-efficient data center design, is empowering this movement by creating new servers engineered for green computing.

One such server is Supermicro’s 4-node BigTwin. The BigTwin features disaggregated server architecture that reduces e-waste by enabling subsystem upgrades.

As technology improves, IT managers can replace components like the CPU, GPU and memory. This extends the life of the chassis, power supplies and cooling systems that might otherwise end up in a landfill.

Twin and Blade server architectures are more efficient because they share power supplies and fans. This can significantly lower their power usage, making them a better choice for green data centers.

The upgraded components that go into these servers now include high-efficiency processors like the AMD EPYC 9654. The infographic below, courtesy of AMD, shows how 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors can power 2,000 virtual machines using up to 35% fewer servers than the competition:

EPYC green infographic

As shown, the potential result is up to 29% less energy consumed annually. That kind of efficiency can save an estimated 35 tons of carbon dioxide—the equivalent of 38 acres of U.S. forest carbon sequestration every year.

Green data centers also employ advanced cooling systems. For instance, Supermicro’s servers include optional liquid cooling. Using fluid to carry heat away from critical components allows IT managers to lower fan speeds inside each server and reduce HVAC usage in data centers.

Deploying efficient cooling systems like these lowers a data center’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), thus reducing carbon emissions from power generation.

Changing for the better, together

No single person, corporation or government can stave off the worst effects of climate crisis. If we are to win this battle, we must work together.

Engineers, industrial designers and data scientists have their work cut out for them. By fueling the evolution of green computing, they—and their corporate managers—can provide us with the tools we need to go green and safeguard our environment for generations to come.

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How ILM creates visual effects faster & cheaper with AMD-powered Supermicro hardware

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How ILM creates visual effects faster & cheaper with AMD-powered Supermicro hardware

ILM, the visual-effects company founded by George Lucas, is using AMD-powered Supermicro servers and workstations to create the next generation of special effects for movies and TV.

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AMD and Supermicro are helping Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) create the future of visual movie and TV production.

ILM is the visual-effects company founded by George Lucas in 1975. Today it’s still on the lookout for better, faster tech. And to get it, ILM leans on Supermicro for its rackmount servers and workstations, and AMD for its processors.

The servers help ILM reduce render times. And the workstations enable better collaboration and storage solutions that move data faster and more efficiently.

All that high-tech gear comes together to help ILM create some of the world’s most popular TV series and movies. That includes “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” “Transformers” and “The Book of Boba Fett.”

It’s a huge task. But hey, someone’s got to create all those new universes, right?

Power hungry—and proud of it

No one gobbles up compute power quite like ILM. Sure, it may have all started with George Lucas dropping an automotive spring on a concrete floor to create the sound of the first lightsaber. But these days, it’s all about the 1s and 0s—a lot of them.

An enormous amount of compute power goes into rendering computer-generated imagery (CGI) like special effects and alien characters. So much power, in fact, that it can take weeks or even months to render an entire movie’s worth of eye candy.

Rendering takes not only time, but also money and energy. Those are the three resources that production companies like ILM must ration. They’re under pressure to manage cash flow and keep to tight production schedules.

By deploying Supermicro’s high-performance and multinode servers powered by AMD’s EPYC processors , ILM gains high core counts and maximum throughput—two crucial components of faster rendering.

Modern filmmakers are also obliged to manage data. Storing and moving terabytes of rendering and composition information is a constant challenge, especially when you’re trying to do it quickly and securely.

The solution to this problem comes in the form of high-performance storage and networking devices. They can shift vast swaths of information from here to there without bottlenecks, overheating or (worst-case scenario) total failure.

EPYC stories

This is the part of the story where CPUs take back some of the spotlight. GPUs have been stealing the show ever since data scientists discovered that graphic processors are the keys to unlocking the power of AI. But producing the next chapter of the “Star Wars” franchise means playing by different rules.

AMD EPYC processors play a starring role in ILM’s render farms. Render farms are big collections of networked server-class computers that work as a team to crunch a metric ton of data.

A typical ILM render farm might contain dozens of high-performance computers like the Supermicro BigTwin. This dual-node processing behemoth can house two 3rd gen AMD EPYC processors, 4TB of DDR5 memory per node and a dozen 2.5-inch hot-swappable solid-state drives (SSDs). In case the specs don’t speak for themselves, that’s an insane amount of power and storage.

For ILM, lighting and rendering happen inside an application by Isotropix called Clarisse. Our hero, Clarisse, relies on CPU rather than GPU power. Unlike most 3D apps, which are single-threaded, Clarisse also features unusually efficient multi-threading.

This lets the application take advantage of the parallel-processing power in AMD’s EPYC CPUs to complete more tasks simultaneously. The results: shorter production times and lower costs.

Coming soon: StageCraft

ILM is taking its tech show on the road with an end-to-end virtual production solution called StageCraft. It exists as both a series of Los Angeles and Vancouver-based sites—ILM calls them “volumes”—as well as mobile pop-up volumes waiting to happen anywhere in the United States and Europe.

The introduction of StageCraft is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, this new production environment makes ILM’s AMD-powered magic wand accessible to a wider range of directors, producers and studios.

For another, StageCraft could catalyze the proliferation of cutting-edge creative tech. This, in turn, could lead to the same kind of competition, efficiency increases and miniaturization that made 4K filmmaking a feature of everyone’s mobile phones.

StageCraft could also usher in a new visual language. The more people with access to high-tech visualization technology, the more likely it is that some unknown aspiring auteur will pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, to change the nature of entertainment forever.

Kinda’ like how George Lucas did it back in the day.

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Absolute Hosting finds the sweet spot with AMD-powered Supermicro servers

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Absolute Hosting finds the sweet spot with AMD-powered Supermicro servers

Absolute Hosting, a South African provider of hosting services to small and midsize businesses, sought to upgrade its hardware, improve its performance, and lower its costs. The company achieved all three goals with AMD-powered Supermicro servers.

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Some brands are so strong, customers ask for them by name. They ask for a Coke when thirsty, click on Amazon.com when shopping online, visit a Tesla showroom when thinking of buying an electric car.

For Absolute Hosting Ltd., a South Africa-based provider of hosting and other digital services for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), it’s not one brand, but two: Supermicro and AMD. More specifically, the combination of Supermicro servers powered by AMD EPYC processors.

“Clients who have switched over to us have been amazed by the performance of our AMD EPYC-powered servers,” says Jade Benson, the founder of Absolute Hosting and now its managing director.

Benson and his colleagues find the Supermicro-AMD brand so powerful, they offer it by name. Check out Absolute Hosting's website, and you’ll see the AMD and Supermicro brands called out by name.

SMB specialists

It wasn’t always the case. Back in 2011, when Benson founded Absolute Hosting, the company served local South African tech resellers. Five years later, in 2016, the company shifted its focus to offering hosting and virtual server services to local SMBs.

One of its hosting services is virtual private servers. VPS hosting provides dedicated resources to each customer’s website, allowing for more control, customization and scalability than they’d get with shared hosting. That makes VPS hosting ideal for businesses that require lots of resources, enjoy high traffic, or need a great deal of control over their hosting environment.

Today Absolute Hosting owns about 100 physical servers and manages roughly 300 VPS servers for clients. The company also supplies its 5,000 clients with other hosting services, including Linux web, WordPress and email.

‘We kept seeing AMD’

Absolute Hosting’s shift to AMD-powered Supermicro servers was driven by its own efforts to refresh and upgrade its hardware, improve its performance and lower its own costs. Initially, the company rented dedicated servers from a provider that relied exclusively on Supermicro hardware.

“So when we decided to purchase our own hardware, we made it a requirement to use Supermicro,” Benson says. “And we kept seeing AMD as the recommended option.”

The new servers were a quick success. Absolute Hosting tested them with key benchmarks, including Cinebench, a cross-platform test suite, and Passmark, which compares the performance of CPUs. And it found them leading for every test application.

Absolute Hosting advertised the new offering on social media and quickly had enough business for 100 VPS servers. The company ran a public beta for customers and allowed the local IT community to conduct their own stress tests.

“The feedback we received was phenomenal,” Benson says. “Everyone was blown away.”

Packing a punch

Absolute Hosting’s solution is based on Supermicro’s AS-2115GT-HNTF GrandTwin server. It packs four hot-pluggable nodes into a 2U rackmount form factor.

Each node includes an AMD EPYC CPU; 12 memory slots for up to 3TB of DDR5 memory; flexible bays for storage or I/O; and up to four hot-swap 2.5-inch NVMe/SATA storage drives.

Absolute Hosting currently uses the AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors. But the Supermicro server now supports the 4th gen AMD EPYC 9004 Series processors, and Benson plans to move to them soon.

Benson considers the AMD-powered Supermicro servers a serious competitive advantage. “There are only a few people we don’t tell about AMD,” he says. “That’s our competitors.”

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Supermicro H13 Servers Maximize Your High-Performance Data Center

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Supermicro H13 Servers Maximize Your High-Performance Data Center

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The modern data center must be both highly performant and energy efficient. Massive amounts of data are generated at the edge and then analyzed in the data center. New CPU technologies are constantly being developed that can analyze data, determine the best course of action, and speed up the time to understand the world around us and make better decisions.

With the digital transformation continuing, a wide range of data acquisition, storage and computing systems continue to evolve with each generation of  a CPU. The latest CPU generations continue to innovate within their core computational units and in the technology to communicate with memory, storage devices, networking and accelerators.

Servers and, by default, the CPUs within those servers, form a continuum of computing and I/O power. The combination of cores, clock rates, memory access, path width and performance contribute to specific servers for workloads. In addition, the server that houses the CPUs may take different form factors and be used when the environment where the server is placed has airflow or power restrictions. The key for a server manufacturer to be able to address a wide range of applications is to use a building block approach to designing new systems. In this way, a range of systems can be simultaneously released in many form factors, each tailored to the operating environment.

The new H13 Supermicro product line, based on 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ CPUs, supports a broad spectrum of workloads and excels at helping a business achieve its goals.

Get speeds, feeds and other specs on Supermicro’s latest line-up of servers

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Single-Root I/O Virtualization Delivers a Big Boost for Performance-Intensive Environments

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Single-Root I/O Virtualization Delivers a Big Boost for Performance-Intensive Environments

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Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) is an interesting standard for performance-intensive computing because it lets a network adapter access resources across a PCIe bus, making it even higher performing. It lets data traffic be routed directly to a particular virtual machine (VM) without interrupting the flow of other traffic across the bus. It does that by bypassing the software switching layer of the virtualization stack, thereby reducing the input/output overhead and improving network performance, stability and reliability. (Get more information about SR-IOV in VMware and Microsoft contexts, for example.)

 

What this means, especially in GPU-based computing, is that each VM has its own dedicated share of the GPU and isn’t forced to compete with other VMs for its share of resources. The feature also helps isolate each VM and is the basic building block for modern VM hyperscale technologies.

 

Tests of SR-IOV have found big benefits, such as lowering processor utilization by 50% and boosting network throughput by up to 30%. This allows for more VMs per host and being able to run heavier workloads on each VM.
 

An excellent server for any virtualization platform is the Supermicro BigTwin® server. With up to 4 servers in just 2U, the Supermicro BigTwin is a versatile and powerful multi-node system that is environmentally friendly due to its shared components. Plus it can handle a wide range of workloads. Learn more about the Supermicro BigTwin model AS -2124BT-HTR.

 

Not a New Idea
 

The technology isn’t new: Scott Lowe wrote about it back in 2009 and SR-IOV was initially supported by Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and with AMD chipsets in 2016. This support has been extended with Azure NVv4 and AWS EC2 G4ad virtual machine instances, which are based on the AMD EPYC™ 7002 CPU and Radeon Pro™ GPU processor families.

The standard is supported by both VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V hosts and in various AMD EPYC™ CPU chipsets with MxGPU technology that is built into the actual silicon. This enables sharing a GPU’s power across multiple users or VMs but providing a similar performance level of a discrete processor.

The SR-IOV technology is a big benefit for immersive cloud-based gaming, desktop-as-a-service, machine learning models and 3D rendering applications.

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CERN Parses Hadron Collider Data with 900 Supermicro Computers and AMD CPUs

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CERN Parses Hadron Collider Data with 900 Supermicro Computers and AMD CPUs

CERN is trying to discover what happened in the nanoseconds following the Big Bang that created all matter. It is manipulating data flows with custom AMD circuitry that slices up the Large Hadron Collider data into smaller pieces. “You need to get all the data pieces together in a single location because only then can you do a meaningful calculation on this stuff,” said Niko Neufeld, a CERN project leader. The effort entails rapid data processing, high-bandwidth access to lots of memory and very speedy I/O among many servers.

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Supermicro has delivered 900 of its BigTwin® A+ 2124BT-HNTR computers employing AMD EPYC™ processors to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) to support the organization’s research. The systems are for running batch computing jobs related to physics-event reconstruction, data analysis and simulations. Many of CERN's discoveries have had a powerful effect on aspects of everyday life, in areas such as medicine and computing.

CERN is home to the largest physics project on earth, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It can collect data on subatomic particle interactions at the rate of 40TB per second. This means the lab needs high-performance computers to sift through the massive amount of data and find the most relevant interactions that will give scientists the data needed to support the right conclusions.

“It is a messy I/O challenge, and has huge data requirements,” said Niko Neufeld, a project leader for online computing at CERN. Neufeld oversees a project investigating the properties of a quark called the beauty particle. The project is attempting to determine what happened in the nanoseconds just after the Big Bang that created all matter. The data flows are manipulated with custom AMD circuitry that slices up the LHC data into smaller pieces. “You need to get all the data pieces together in a single location because only then can you do a meaningful calculation on this stuff," Neufeld said. The effort entails rapid data processing, high-bandwidth access to lots of memory and very speedy I/O among the many Supermicro servers.

There are at least three reasons that CERN gravitated to its eventual choice of servers and storage systems supplied by Supermicro and AMD. One is that CERN has been an AMD customer through many processor generations. Another is that there was support for 128 PCIe Gen 4 data paths that let networking cards run with minimal bottlenecks. The third reason was the capability of the CPUs and servers to support the 512GB RAM installed on each server, so the servers can collectively keep pace with the data driving at them at 40TB/sec.

“This generation of the AMD EPYC™ processor platform offers an architectural advantage, and there isn’t any current server that offers as much power and slots,” he said. Finally, because of the vast compute power of the Supermicro BigTwins, CERN was able to reduce its overall server count by a third, making the project more energy efficient and providing the space to add more servers should that be needed. “We could eventually double our capacity and occupy the same physical space,” he said. “It gives us a lot of headroom.”

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