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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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Supporting Complex Computational Needs with Turnkey Computer Clusters

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Supporting Complex Computational Needs with Turnkey Computer Clusters

Building the next generation of technical computing equipment has become easier, thanks to the combination of International Computer Concepts’ (ICC) hardware and Define Tech Ltd.’s software and firmware. The result marks a new direction for this market segment, offering a more flexible and useful approach, because it comes with software and applications for running complex engineering simulations.

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  • International Computer Concepts (ICC), Define Tech Ltd.

Building the next generation of technical computing equipment has become easier, thanks to the combination of hardware from International Computer Concepts (ICC) and software and firmware from Define Tech Ltd. You'll find the combined technology delivering solutions like computer-aided engineering, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics and geologic data analysis.

 

Such applications depend on huge datasets and complex computational requirements. They typically rely on clusters of multi-core computers, distributed storage and high-speed networking components.

 

The combination is called a turnkey cluster, and it is a good description because it marks a new direction for this market segment. In the past, clustered computers required a great deal of custom assembly, matching the components for throughput and performance, plus developing special firmware and software to take advantage of these benefits. This solution from ICC and Define Tech offers a more flexible and useful approach, because it comes with software and specialized applications that are optimized for running complex engineering simulations, such as Ansys and OpenFOAM.

 

The applications run across a collection of CPU chipsets from AMD, including the latest version of AMD’s EPYC 7003 series of processors that feature high processor core counts, high memory bandwidth and support for high-speed input/output channels in a single chip. These processors feature AMD 3D V-Cache technology and leverage true 3D die stacking for higher L3 cache delivery, which is helpful in these circumstances.

 

“With this latest addition to our HPC cluster suite, we aim to provide our customers an easy-to-use, cost-effective, AI-optimized solution made specifically for simulation-driven engineering workloads,” said ICC’s Director of Development, Alexey Stolyar.

 

For more on this, see ICC's project document as well as Define Tech’s explanatory page.

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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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Lawrence Livermore Labs Advances Scientific Research with AMD GPU Accelerators

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Lawrence Livermore Labs Advances Scientific Research with AMD GPU Accelerators

The Lawrence Livermore National Lababoratory chose to use a cluster of 120 servers running AMD EPYC™ processors with nearly 1,000 AMD Instinct™ GPU accelerators. The hardware, facilitated by Supermicro, was an excellent match for the molecular dynamics simulations required for the Lab's cutting-edge research, which combines machine learning with structural biology concepts.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is one of the centers of high-performance computing (HPC) in the world and it is constantly upgrading its equipment to meet increasing computational demands. It houses one of the world's largest computing environments. Among its more pressing research goals derives from the COVID-19 crisis.

Lawrence Livermore researches and supports proposals from the COVID-19 HPC Consortium, which is composed of more than a dozen research organizations across government, academia and private industry. It aims to accelerate disease detection and treatment efforts, as well as to screen antibody candidates virtually and run several disease-related mathematical simulations.

"By leveraging the massive compute capabilities of the world’s [more] powerful supercomputers, we can help accelerate critical modeling and research to help fight the virus," said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Datacenter and Embedded Systems Group.

The lab chose to use a cluster of 120 servers running AMD EPYC™ processors with nearly 1,000 AMD Instinct™ GPU accelerators. The servers were connected by Mellanox switches. The product choices had two benefits: First, the hardware, facilitated by Supermicro, was an excellent match for the molecular dynamics simulations required for this research. The lab is performing cutting-edge research that combines machine learning with structural biology concepts. Second, the gear was tested and packaged together, so it could become operational when it was delivered to the lab.

AMD software engineers and application specialists were able to modify components to run GPU-based applications. This is top-of-the-line gear. The AMD accelerators deliver up to 13.3 teraFLOPS of single-precision peak floating-point performance combined with 32GB of high-bandwidth memory. The scientists were able to reduce their simulation run-times from seven hours to just 40 minutes, allowing  them to test multiple modeling iterations efficiently.

For more information, see the Supermicro case study and Lawrence Livermore report.

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