Entries filed under “ISC12”

ISC’12 wrapped up today with news that the conference had record turnout with 2403 attendees.

Even though we keep setting attendance records each year, it’s exciting when we reach or projected goal and having 2,403 attendees this year was very gratifying,” said ISC Executive Director Martin Meuer. “It’s also exciting to see so many members of the HPC community in Asia making the trip to Germany to join us.”

And while we all know that supercomputing is serious business, at ISC, they surely know how to show attendees a good time as you can see in this video. Next year the show moves to Leipzig. Now, don’t youto want go?

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Supermicro always impresses me at HPC shows with a wide array of hardware on display. They must be targeting us folks in the geek crowd, because no other vendor has more components, motherboards, and form factors in their exhibit. To learn more, I caught up with David Okada, the company’s Senior Marketing Manager.

insideHPC: Supermicro always seems to always be among the first-to-market with shipping products after new processor and GPU announcements. Does this kind of agility give you a competitive advantage?

David Okada: Supermicro works very closely with our technology partners through development stages to product launch. Even as we extend and evolve our own product lines, we are constantly qualifying future technologies and preparing our platforms for next generation products. This certainly gives us a competitive advantage as we offer the widest range of Server Building Block Solutions ready for the market at any given launch and Supermicro’s customers benefit with fastest access to leading edge technology with not just one or two choices, but a wide range of options so they can create solutions to maximize their margins.

insideHPC: How important is energy efficiency to Supermicro and its customers?

David Okada: Energy-efficiency is a major driving factor for Supermicro’s product development. As we provide the computing infrastructure for large scale data centers, it is our corporate responsibility to ensure we do our part to reduce the power consumption and improve the green computing profile of our solutions. We engineer our own advanced high efficiency (95%+) digital switching, Platinum Level power supplies and Battery Backup Power (BBP™) modules to best manage the power delivery to our solutions. We also specialize in board and chassis level design to optimize component layout and cabling for the most efficient airflow which reduces fan speed and resulting power consumption. We also innovate with high density architectures such as our Twin, SuperBlade® and Double-Sided Storage, MicroCloud™ and most recently launched FatTwin™ platforms to share power and cooling resources further reducing material waste and maximizing power utilization. Our latest push is to combine this power and thermal management expertise to offer free-air cooling solutions that operate in high ambient temperature environments up to 47°C effectively eliminating air conditioning costs and power consumption. We feel confident that customers utilizing complete PUE (power usage effectiveness) optimized solutions from Supermicro will not only lower their TCO, but will also help the planet and our environment in the process.

insideHPC: Does Supermicro have much play in the TOP500, or is that not your sweet spot?

David Okada: Yes, Supermicro has the widest range of GPU server systems on the market and is very experienced with applying GPU technology in supercomputer clusters. We are featured on the TOP500 with a variety of deployments and will be growing our presence with new scalable architectures such as our recently released FatTwin™ platform.

insideHPC: ISC will feature 170 exhibits. What makes Supermicro stand out in the HPC marketplace?

David Okada: Supermicro has launched a new high-density compute/high-capacity storage platform, FatTwin™ (www.supermicro.com/FatTwin), that supports dual 135W Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 processors and up to 8 hot-swappable 3.5″ HDDs per U in 8/4/2 node configurations. These systems are also PUE optimized to operate in high ambient temperature environments up to 47°C. With Supermicro’s FatTwin, Data Centers can implement high-performance, highly-efficient, free-air cooled solutions in industry standard 19″ rack configurations that can be flexibly configured in multiple ways to solve a wide variety of customer needs..

insideHPC: What will Supermicro be showcasing at ISC’12?

We are excited about all of our new products including the Supermicro FatTwin, a new 4U, 8/4 node server that joins our SuperBlade, GPU Platforms, SuperWorkstation, 4-Way and Twin architecture solutions for HPC.

insideHPC: Supermicro has been a platinum sponsor of ISC for years. What is
is about this event that keeps you coming back?

David Okada: Supermicro thrives on creating the best high-performance, high-efficiency platforms for supercomputing. It is our passion to perfect our solutions and offer this exacting quality to our customers so they can build supercomputing solutions that allow them to achieve their goals faster in the most cost-effective manner. Supermicro products are being increasingly selected by influential supercomputing customers so ISC is the perfect venue for us to show our leading-edge advanced supercomputing technologies to the customers who can deploy them.