High Performance Computing (HPC) can enable humans to understand the world around us, from atomic behaviour to how the universe is expanding. While HPC used to be associated with a “supercomputer,” today’s HPC environments are created using hundreds to thousands of individual servers, connected by a high speed and low latency networking fabric. To take advantage of thousands of separate computing elements or “cores” simultaneously, applications need to be designed and implemented to work in parallel, sharing intermediate results as required.

The Supermicro AOC-S100GC-i2C is perhaps one of the most interesting NICs that is on the market today. This is a dual 100GbE solution designed for Supermicro servers. What is somewhat different is that this NIC uses the Intel 800 series or Columbiaville networking first announced in 2019. Intel went into production in the summer of 2020 so this is one of the first NICs out there with Intel’s new “foundational” NIC stack. There are some major benefits and changes to Intel’s networking offering here.

Supermicro announces the doubling of GPU capabilities with a new 4U server supporting eight NVIDIA HGX A100 GPUs. The flexible range of solutions powered by NVIDIA GPUs and GPU software from the NVIDIA NGC ecosystem provides the right building blocks for diverse tasks for organisations addressing various verticals — from AI inferencing on developed models to HPC to high-end training.

Nicht jeder bringt Supermicro und Supercomputing zusammen. Doch sowohl das Center for Scientific Computing (CSC), eine Initiative des Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies und der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, als auch das Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory setzen nun Plattformen des Herstellers ein - einmal mit AMD- und einmal mit AMD-Komponenten.