At SC19, Supermciro was out in full force. The company showcased a number of solutions, but there are two that we wanted to highlight after the show. One is an AMD EPYC 7002 series GPU server. The other is an Intel system with the new Intel Nervana NNP-T cards.
Supermicro AS-4124GS-TNR GPU Compute Server
The first system we wanted to highlight is the Supermciro AS-4124GS-TNR server. This utilizes Supermicro’s traditional 4U GPU compute server design, with a few twists.
In this view, we can see 8x double-width GPUs along with additional open slots on the daughterboard. Supermicro typically uses a daughterboard for its PCIe slots as we showed even back in our 2015 Supermicro 4028GR-TR 4U 8-Way GPU SuperServer Review. You will also notice that the connection between the main motherboard and the PCIe daughterboard utilizes cables. This allows for better signal integrity and also allows one to re-configure the system’s topology.
You also will notice that there are no PCIe switches on the daughterboard. That is because the system is based on dual AMD EPYC 7002 CPUs.
Supermicro is using two AMD EPYC 7002 “Rome” CPUs which means it can deliver high core counts and high memory capacity per GPU. With this form factor, Supermciro has 16 DDR4 lanes and up to 32 DDR4 RDIMMs supported.
Supermicro Intel Nervana NNP-T Training System
At SC19, we also saw something shown at Intel AI Summit 2019 a few weeks earlier. Supermicro has a dual Intel Xeon Scalable server with 8x Intel Nervana NNP-T AI training accelerators onboard.
This has become a reference system of sorts for Intel as the companies showed off the solution with multiple racks of systems at AI Day 2019.
You can see the yellow and black covering for the PCIe switches on the Intel solution, so this is a great way to contrast the Intel and AMD systems and show the differences.
