Recently, Prof. Brian Robinson from the respected 3D Professor site flew to US and interviewed Charles Liang, known as the founder and CEO of Supermicro. This Tier 2 vendor manufacturers a lot of systems for Tier 1 vendors such as Cray, Intel and many others, but the company also designs and sells its own solutions.
During this interview, Charles revealed a lot of very interesting trends for his company. After all, Supermicro does now manufacture worlds' most efficient power supply, with 93% efficiency… that should be enough for 90 Plus Bronze or 80 Plus Platinum rating, if those ratings existed.
But the company isn't stopping there. On the first day of Computex, Supermicro revealed its GPU Preconfigured Supercomputer line-up, putting as much as four graphics cards in a complete 1U server setup, e.g. with CPUs, storage and all. Remember that nVidia's own S1070 is nothing else but a 1U chassis with power supply and four Tesla GPGPUs, that's it - it has to connect to a server in order to work.
As the interview developed, Charles revealed more and more details about the future, showing absolute confidence in Supermicro's plans. The company is currently building a completely new rack standard, built from the ground up. "We have a team designing the next generation rack. So *very* soon you will see our next generation. A whole brand new concept and our goal is to optimize the rack for easy maintenance and improve thermal efficiency whilst reducing power consumption required for cooling down the whole system within the data centre. "
Charles continued with the details about how the company is designing the next generation rack level standard, noting that they might even deploy water-cooling in the future. "We start off from board level, system level, rack level and then the whole data center,including possibly even water cooling in the future."
When asked about the potential shortage of drinking water, Charles simply claimed that the company might even deploy using ocean water to cool down the rack servers, instead of using drinking water combined with anti-algae and anti-corrosion liquids. This interview features several other bombs, and if you are interested in the way industry is heading, this interview is a non-miss. The news from Computex cannot be as important as this one.
