Presenting a Gigabyte Ampere Altra Max Arm Server with NVIDIA A100 at NVIDIA GTC

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Gigabyte G242 R32 Side View
Gigabyte G242 R32 Side View

This is a quick and shameless plug. Gigabyte is sponsoring a session at NVIDIA GTC this week. The talk shows working with the Gigabyte Ampere Altra Max and NVIDIA A100 development system. We had to build the server from scratch, and this is similar to the NVIDIA Arm development platform, with a few STH differences.

Presenting a Gigabyte Ampere Altra Max Server with NVIDIA A100 at NVIDIA GTC

If you want to check out the talk, titled “Exploring the Future with Gigabyte’s Ampere Arm Server and NVIDIA GPU Compute” A41392, Gigabyte tweeted out the link last week:

The topic of NVIDIA GPUs on Arm architectures is important, especially with NVIDIA Grace Hopper coming out in 2023 based on Arm Neoverse V2 cores. Before that happens, we wanted to show the current state and the best development platform out there.

The talk should be available for at least the remainder of GTC. We will have a different version that we will have on the STH main site and YouTube, but it is going to be a bit different from the GTC version and is being recorded weeks later. That STH version should be live in a week or two.

Ampere Altra Max M128 30 With 2x NVIDIA A100 80GB PCIe 7
Ampere Altra Max M128 30 With 2x NVIDIA A100 80GB PCIe 7

As a full disclosure here, Gigabyte did sponsor this talk at NVIDIA GTC 2022, since getting a talk on the GTC agenda is not “free”. Gigabyte also provided the server and helped source the A100’s we are using. Ampere computing provided the CPUs. We used the memory, networking, and storage that we had on hand. I do not receive direct compensation for the talk, but Gigabyte does purchase ads on STH from the banners I have seen (an external marketing firm handles all of this for STH, so I do not get hands-on.)

Final Words

Folks are probably noticing that I am doing more of these types of events. Last week, for example, I presented at Netreo NUGGET 2022. Later this week, I am doing a closed-door presentation for a company on CXL. The great part is that these companies are letting me offer my unfiltered perspective. The CXL piece update, server industry update, and the NVIDIA on Arm update are all stories that I want to do independent of the speaking engagements, they just happen to help give deadlines to put some thoughts down. Expect all three topics will be ones we will take up in the not-too-distant future on the STH main site and YouTube channel.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Under the 3rd image it says: “Ampere Altra Max M128 30 With 2x NVIDIA A100 80GB PCIe 7”.

    Since you already wrote about PCIe 7 (https://www.servethehome.com/pci-sig-starts-work-on-pcie-7-0-gen7-for-2025/) we assume that the title is correct.

    I wonder in what circumstances PCIe 7 will be useful, since PCIe 4 doesn’t suffer from any bottleneck or offer much improvement over PCIe 3 for graphics cards; for Ethernet or SSD (even CXL) it’s a different manner, but not for graphics cards.

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