Vik Malyala

The data centre industry is facing continued unprecedented demand in the face of new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). As a result, industry leaders are having to develop and harness new ways to ensure that enterprise demand is met, whilst keeping energy levels low and as sustainable as possible. 

With this in mind, we spoke with Supermicro’s Vik Malyala about what is required for the modern data centre. Malyala is the Managing Director & President, EMEA and Senior Vice President in Technology and AI at the company and manages multiple technology initiatives and partnerships. 

This includes the field engineering and solutions enablement teams responsible for understanding data centres, large enterprise and service provider customers’ requirements, in addition to facilitating the deployment of optimised solutions that meet evolving customer needs.

Here, Malyala speaks with AI Magazine about the importance of liquid cooling solutions for data centres, in addition to how facilities must evolve with the new requirements imposed by AI.

How important are liquid cooling solutions for the data centre industry?

With the continued increase of the TDP of CPUs, GPUs, and network/accelerators, liquid cooling in the data centre will become even more prevalent than ever. 

Data centres are increasingly under pressure to remove the heat generated by the latest generations of CPUs and GPUs. With the significant cooling ability of liquid over air and racks now being designed to house up to 100kW of computing power, data centres of the not-too-distant future will have to incorporate liquid cooling into their plans. 

Most data centres are constrained by the available for various reasons. The cost of electricity continues to increase, which is required for traditional CRAC units, but can be mitigated with liquid cooling solutions. Using liquid cooling also has a tremendous benefit for the environment.

How do you see liquid cooling evolving to support the demands caused by AI?

Liquid cooling within a data centre has been shown to be efficient and reduce energy costs. At Supermicro, we anticipate that 20% of data centres will adopt liquid cooling this calendar year to remove the heat generated by today's high end servers.  

Looking forward, liquid cooling may be adopted more as AI computing gets deployed from core to the edge. Supermicro servers are designed to use liquid cooling for both the CPUs and GPUs, which are designed to run constantly at high loads for AI training and inferencing.

Can you speak to some of the new liquid cooling solutions that Supermicro is offering?

Supermicro is creating innovative system designs that enable today's AI infrastructure to continue to produce results. New, compact servers that previously took over twice the rack space are available using liquid cooling. 

Supermicro offers an entire Liquid Cooling solution that includes custom cold plates, manifolds, hot-swappable power and water pump in CDU, CDM, advanced out of band management for rack and a cooling tower option. This means that all components can be ordered and installed by Supermicro to improve logistics, time to deploy, predictable quality, and support offerings for pre and post deployment.

Given such a rise in AI demand, how is Supermicro adapting its current offerings to support its clients?

Supermicro has a long history of supporting GPU and other accelerators in server offerings in various form factors, and capacities. We have always enabled our customers with TTM advantages due to our close collaboration with technology partners and building block approach. 

The rise in AI demand also allowed Supermicro to provide the right sized high performance compute, high capacity storage offerings and network switching. Given the extensive and broad product portfolio Supermicro is able to support data centre to edge deployments from our worldwide manufacturing facilities, from highly tuned AI servers to enterprise solutions. 

We work with the leading CPU and GPU providers to deliver AI solutions from the edge to the data centre. Our building block architecture allows us to bring these solutions to market faster than many other server providers.

What does the future look like for Supermicro? How do you envision the company's solutions changing?

The focus of Supermicro is on bringing solutions that lowers the barrier for adopting latest technology at scale while improving efficiencies throughout. We continue to expand our engagement with other technology leaders (silicon, ISV etc) to improve time-to-delivery (TTD) top quality products, provide customised rack-level builds and installations that include optimised server, storage, networking, and  software based on air and liquid cooling, thoroughly tested and validated for better customer experience. 

We are delivering the most advanced AI solutions in the industry optimised for AI training and inferencing. Our broad range of servers are ideal for enterprise IT workloads.  We provide rack scale solutions, meaning the entire rack and cluster are thoroughly tested, including customer software as needed. We can supply the entire IT infrastructure and have the capability to deliver rack-scale solutions worldwide. In many cases, the customer just has to plug in the power and network cable, and they are ready to go.

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