Are the New Iranian Supers Powered by GPUs?

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Few architectual details were released this week about two new Iranian supercomputers at Amir Kabir University. But, in a recent blog post, Chris Samuel has done a bit of forensic investigation that indicates these systems are likely powered by GPUs:

However, looking at the Iranian photo spread that they link to, the boxes in question are SuperMicro based systems (and so could be sourced from just about anywhere), with some of their 2U storage based boxes with heaps of disk and some 1U boxes that are presumably the compute nodes. The odd thing is that they’re spaced out quite a bit in the rack, and they’ve got two fans on the left hand side (which indicates something unusual about the layout of the box). The nice thing is that it’s pretty easy to find a slew of boxes on SuperMicro’s website that matches the picture, it’s their 1U GPU node range which are dual GPU beasts, for example.

Iranian supercoputer at Amir Kabir University

Comments

  1. Thanks for the mention Rich!

    The image you’ve got at the bottom as I write is showing the other boxes which Jeff Johnson has identified as 2U/4node boxes.