GIGABYTE
Helping Enterprises Gain the HPC Upper Hand

High-Performance Computing (HPC) has gone from fringe to mainstream—finding applications in just about every industry. The increasing need for high-efficiency computing, data storage, and continued IT diversification and expansion, alongside advances in AI, cloud, virtualization, has fueled the HPC market’s growth. However, companies often struggle with HPC improvisation and in finding efficient, stable products with minimal heat dissipation at a nominal price range. Addressing these needs is Taiwan-based GIGABYTE Technology. As an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, the company maintains its position as one of the top vendors in the worldwide HPC market. Founded in 1986, GIGABYTE offers a comprehensive product lineup that caters to the requirements of business IT, consumer applications, gaming, and cloud systems, to name a few. The company is also a global leader in the PC industry who began its journey by offering motherboards and graphics cards. Over the years, GIGABYTE has expanded its product portfolio to include PC components and accessories, broadband network devices and storage products, wireless communication products, PC peripherals, and mini-PCs, to name a few. “In the last ten years, we have established ourselves as a leader in the HPC field, successfully supporting GPUs and creating cost-effective heterogeneous computing solutions. We have close ties to major vendors in the market, including NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Arm, and more,” states Etay Lee, GM at GIGABYTE. “We co-develop our systems for them, which enables us to launch products quickly in comparison to our competitors.”

Lee explains that the boom in HPC has resulted in the rapid emergence of new server processing architectures for executing highly complex, computationally intensive HPC applications reliably, quickly, and efficiently, particularly in the domains of AI and rendering. This has invariably spiked the demand for GPU-based, parallel processing of data and the requirement of improved GPU performance in HPC clusters. To this end, the company offers its H-Series high-density servers and G-Series GPU servers, designed especially for HPC applications. They can seamlessly combine large computing power into a 1U, 2U, or 4U server chassis. In addition, the servers can be linked into a cluster via interconnects such as Infiniband, Ethernet, or Omni- Path. GIGABYTE has also built an Immersion Cooling Proof of Concept (POC) Unit to address heat dissipation challenges around HPC servers. A two-phase immersion cooling system is fully compatible with 2U form factors and can be modified on request to suit 1U or 4U models. Many servers in GIGABYTE’s GPU Server product line are compatible with the POC unit. This includes G291-281, a scalable, high-density model designed for high performance and parallel computing and can house an unrivalled eight double-slot GPUs or co-processor cards within a 2U chassis and G481-HA0, a 4U dual root server that supports 5G network infrastructure.

“We integrate our CPU and GPU products such that we can get the maximum performance out of each and we offer many cooling solutions such as air cooling, immersion cooling and liquid cooling,” explains Lee. “We are proficient in producing systems that have a priority for GPU cards. We have a very versatile lineup of quality servers for all different kinds of cards alongside the capability of excellent cooling,” GIGABYTE is therefore perfectly poised to address the needs of the expanding, increasingly heterogeneous global market through an astute vision and strategy, a comprehensive portfolio of products and an expert team.

We integrate our CPU and GPU products such that we can get the maximum performance out of each and we offer many cooling solutions such as air cooling, immersion cooling, and liquid cooling

With a diverse range of products in its portfolio and several years of industry experience, GIGABYTE is known for the quality of its product and excels at understanding the clients’ needs and accordingly recommending the optimal response to their problems. For instance, GIGABYTE helped the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) delve into particle physics with its servers. CERN wanted to expand their data processing equipment by acquiring HPC capabilities. They specifically wanted servers equipped with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors and multiple graphics accelerators such as the NVIDIA Tensor Core A100 PCIe card, which would also support PCIe Gen 4.0 Computing Cards. GIGABYTE was the only company with the solution to match their demand and offered custom-designed servers (G482-Z51), offering them cutting-edge computing power. The company not only developed an advanced heat dissipation solution as per their requirements but also created specific expansion slots and minute adjustments to the BIOS. GIGABYTE was able to provide CERN a solution capable of analyzing large amounts of data and completing HPC workloads and the processing power of the GPU Servers’ multi-core design propelled the study of high energy physics to new heights.

Lee emphasizes that GIGABYTE’s industry connection allows them to gain a competitive edge. He talks about the company’s recent distinction of being among the first companies to offer servers as part of the NVIDIA-Certified Systems program, which validates the best server configurations for performance, manageability, security, and scalability. GIGABYTE can customize prototypes as per the client’s requirements and provide a wide range of products, allowing customers to choose what they want. Having established itself as a renowned name in the U.S., Russia, and Europe, looking ahead, the company envisions expanding its customer base further in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and North Africa. “We have been progressive and proactive in developing our plans. We aim to spend more on our R & D and develop different new technologies and solutions, ranging from cooling technology to storage solutions,” concludes Lee.