Nov. 12, 2018 — At SC18, Sugon is demonstrating the first global pre-release of a new generation of Silicon Cube HPC series, an integration of multiple cutting-edge technologies towards the development of supercomputing technology and applications in the future.
This new generation of Silicon Cube series High Performance Computer adopted the phase-change liquid cooling technology with the highest computing density and energy efficiency. Meanwhile, according to Dr. Li Bin, General Manager of HPC Division at Sugon, the system applied many other crucial technologies to make it a world leading HPC solution in terms of technology and engineering implementation, including computing, networking, storage, cooling, overall management and so on. The product meets for the higher demands of compute density, energy efficiency, and storage.
Pioneering frontier of supercomputing
For decades, the performance of supercomputers has maintained a steady and rapid growth, at about 1,000 times in every 10 years. However, in the past few years, during the physical limitation of chip cores, the rate drops significantly. The main reason, Dr.Li Bin believes, relates to that supercomputing is approaching to its power consumption and system scale limits, therefore is facing challenges from TDP, extendibility and reliability etc.
On the other hand, the astounding popularity of artificial intelligence, largely represented by machine learning and deep learning, boosts explosive growth of computing resources demands. At the same time, facing increasingly serious global challenges, we have utilized supercomputers to deepened the exploration in global weather and climate, new energies, new materials, precision medicine, brain-style computing, etc. This brings boundless needs of supercomputing from scientific research and industry aspects.
“It’s no longer possible to improve the performance of supercomputers by simply enlarging system scale or increasing power dissipation. Higher performance has to depend more on lower PUE.” Dr.Li Bin said. Sugon believes that the development of HPC will inevitably focus on energy efficiency, application scale-up, architecture upgrading and intelligence evolution.
With this observation, Sugon has emphasized technological innovation in developing the new generation of HPC. After years of technology accumulation and product perfection, Sugon has made remarkable achievements, especially in lower PUE and architecture upgrading, which have been included in the New Generation of Sugon Silicon Cube series High Performance Computer.
Solving the greatest HPC technical challenges
In general, the highlights of the new HPC series lay on the comprehensive improvements in PUE, network optimization and scalability. Comparing with its predecessor launched in 2015, the new series delivers a highly technical and successful result in solving power consumption, extendibility and reliability challenges.
Dr. Li Bin further remarked that the new Silicon Cube has comprehensively applied the architecture adoption of heterogeneous computing, improving system PUE remarkably, in addition to strengthening system supports for AI applications. Meanwhile, the system has applied the most advanced 6D-Torus high speed network technology to further improve system network I/O performance as well as system fault tolerance and extendibility.
One pioneering initiative of the new series is embodied as the application of immersion phase change liquid cooling technology. By use of such technology, the system PUE could be lower than 1.04, and the system performance is increased by at least 5% on the other hand. If fact, Sugon plays a global leading role in both liquid cooling technology and engineering implementation, Dr. Li added.
Moreover, the New Generation of Sugon Silicon Cube series High Performance Computer has integrated the company’s latest technology in EB level high-
performance storage, which is highly compatible to the improvement computing performance. By means of software defined hyper-convergence management and resource scheduling, and systematic operation maintenance and operation supports, Sugon has further broadened the coverage of HPC applications among industries, and further explore the smarter supercomputers.
“Comparing with its predecessor, in general, the new series has improved the network performance by 2 times, overall performance by 10 times, and computing density by 10 to 20 times, and the system energy efficiency by 4 times. The improvement of various technical indicators has laid a solid foundation for developing the future high-performance computers. ”
Ye Jian, Chief Operating Officer of Sugon, indicated that as the earliest and largest HPC vendor in China, Sugon has always stood at the forefront of technology and focused on the continues delivery and upgrade of products. As a group of scientists from CAS, we are committed to the development of China High-Tech as world’s leading high-performance computing industry.
