At SC21, there was nowhere near the amount of hardware that we would normally find at a Supercomputing event. As a result, it was actually harder than one might expect to make a top 10 list. We still compiled a list, but it took quite a few liberties to get here.
Top 10 Showcases of SC21
As a few notes on how we got here. First, we did not cover liquid cooling. We did an entire Liquid Cooling Solutions Run-Through from SC21 and so it seems like that was an area covered. Further, we had the Intel shares its plan to zettascale and video so we excluded those. Perhaps one of the more controversial exclusions was Supermicro. Let us just say this. Supermicro had, by far, the most hardware-rich booth. If we had an award for bringing hardware, Supermicro would have won it.
Still, we covered the OAM MI200 platform and the Habana Labs Gaudi platform in the liquid cooling video. We also covered Liquid Cooling Next-Gen Servers Getting Hands-on with 3 Supermicro Options, the Supermicro 60-Bay Top Loading Storage Server, Hyper-E 2U, Supermicro NVIDIA Redstone 2U server, Supermicro BigTwin 2U4N, and more from the booth. We will soon have the 2U 2-node 6x GPU system hands-on piece in a few days. If we included Supermicro, it would have occupied half of the list just because they had the most hardware. Since we are already doing in-depth pieces on most of the systems they showcased, we are going to focus on everyone else.
That also left us in a bit of a pickle because excluding Supermicro and liquid cooling meant that we had fewer than 10 for our top 10. Still, we needed a top 10 video, so here it is:
Since we do not have the capacity do to a dozen or more articles during this busy period, here are the timestamps:
- 00:00 Introduction and Sparsity
- 02:40 HPE-Cray EX235a with AMD Instinct MI250X and Milan
- 03:57 Intel Saphire Rapids and CXL Development Platform
- 05:08 Kioxia EM6 NVMe-oF SSD and Ingrasys System
- 07:07 AIC’s J5010-02 GPU Box
- 08:35 Pliops XDP for NVMe “RAID”
- 10:48 Anheuser-Busch Brewery and Bottling-Canning Line
- 12:32 Honorable Mention #1: Liqid
- 13:28 SambaNova DataScale Platform and Cardinal SN10
- 14:38 Rockport Networks Switchless Fabric
- 16:01 OSS JBOF JBOG and Aviation NVIDIA DGX
- 18:04 GigaIO Routable PCIe Fabric
- 19:29 Honorable Mention #2: SpectraLogic Tape Robot
- 20:08 Final Words
We added some of the key links in the above list to STH coverage around some of these solutions.
Final Words
Hopefully, our regular readers will check this one out and see some of the cool hardware. It was certainly nowhere near as busy as a normal SC21, but for an hour of running around the show floor, we still found some interesting hardware.
Im just sittin here appreciating that STH covers small companies in this too.