Supermicro's Plans to Scale Technology for AI Data Centres
Supermicro has introduced new solutions to its portfolio designed to address the growing demand for more efficient and scalable AI infrastructure.
As a leader in optimised IT solutions and founded in 1993, the company remains committed to delivering first-to-market innovation across the technology industry, including cloud, AI, 5G telco and edge infrastructure.
Its offerings are designed to enable the next generation of digital transformation, with systems designed to support numerous aspects of the data centre, including processors, GPUs and power and cooling solutions such as liquid cooling.
Data Centre Magazine takes a look at these new innovations.
DLC-2: Next-generation direct liquid-cooling solutions
The company's new Direct Liquid Cooling solution, DLC-2, is engineered to capture up to 98% of heat generated by GPUs, resulting in quieter operations with data centre noise reduction of up to 50 decibels.
This cooling innovation arrives as liquid-cooled data centres are projected to grow from less than 1% of the market to approximately 30% within a year.
- Up to 40% power savings in the data centre
- Liquid cooling provides faster time-to-deployment and reduced time-to-online
- Up to 40% reduced water consumption with warm water cooling now available
- Quiet data centre operation enabled at 50dB
The DLC-2 solution is designed to address several critical challenges facing modern data centre operators, including power consumption, water usage and space constraints. According to Supermicro, the technology reduces data centre power consumption by up to 40% compared to traditional air-cooled installations, while simultaneously decreasing water consumption by up to 40% through the use of warm water cooling at inlet temperatures of up to 45°C.
“With the expected demand for liquid-cooled data centres rising to 30% of all installations, we realised that current technologies were insufficient to cool these new AI-optimised systems,” says Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro.
“Supermicro continues to remain committed to innovation, green computing and improving the future of AI, by significantly reducing data centre power and water consumption, noise and space. Our latest liquid-cooling innovation, DLC-2, saves data centre electricity costs by up to 40%.”
The technology also incorporates cold plates for CPUs, GPUs, memory, PCIe switches and voltage regulators, which reduces the need for high-speed fans and rear-door heat exchangers.
This design choice, according to the company, contributes to lower cooling costs and enables the system to support increased supply coolant temperatures.
A key component of the new architecture is a GPU-optimised Supermicro server that includes eight Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and two Intel Xeon 6 CPUs in 4U of rack height.
The DLC-2 solution stack supports the new 4U front I/O NVIDIA HGX B200 8-GPU system and features an in-rack Coolant Distribution Unit that has the capacity to remove 250kW of heat generated per rack.
DCBBS to simplify and shorten global-scale buildouts of AI data centres
Alongside its new cooling technology, Supermicro has unveiled its Data Centre Building Block Solutions (DCBBS), which aim to streamline the process of outfitting liquid-cooled AI facilities.
The DCBBS approach stands to extend Supermicro’s system-level building block philosophy to encompass entire data centres. This means it can provide standardised yet flexible architecture for handling demanding AI training and inference workloads.
- Easy to design, build, deploy and operate for all critical computing and cooling infrastructure
- Quick time-to-deployment and quick time-to-online with everything required to fully outfit AI/IT data centres
- Saving cost with modularised building block solution architecture
- High quality and high availability
The comprehensive solution aims to address the full spectrum of infrastructure requirements for AI deployments. Supermicro claims this comprehensive approach enables faster implementation and reduced costs.
“Supermicro's DCBBS enables clients to easily construct data centre infrastructure with the fastest time-to-market and time-to-online advantage, deploying as quickly as three months,” says Charles. “With our total solution coverage, including designing data centre layouts and network topologies, power and battery backup-units, DCBBS simplifies and accelerates AI data centre buildouts leading to reduced costs and improved quality.”
The company also offers customisation opportunities, meaning the customer can tailor the solutions to suit their specific requirements.
Solutions like this are designed to support data centres amid high AI demand, particularly as they have to confront sustainability challenges. By offering flexible technology that can be embedded into an existing facility, organisations can scale their data centre operations without having to build out lots of new infrastructure.
Charles adds: “Along with our DLC-2 technology, DCBBS also helps customers save up to 40% power, reducing 60% data centre footprint and decreasing 40% water consumption, all of which leads to 20% lower TCO.”
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