Supermicro has added to their robust line of Universal GPU systems with an 8U box capable of housing eight socketed (SXM) NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs that support NVLink and NVSwitch. This means NVSwitch GPU-to-GPU bandwidth of 600 GBs and a total aggregate bandwidth of 4.8TB/s with the A100s. In addition to handling today’s needs, the Supermicro GPU SuperServer SYS-820GP-TNAO is ready for what’s next, with plenty of headroom for higher TDP CPUs and accelerator cards.
Supermicro has added to their robust line of Universal GPU systems with an 8U box capable of housing eight socketed (SXM) NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs that support NVLink and NVSwitch. This means NVSwitch GPU-to-GPU bandwidth of 600 GBs and a total aggregate bandwidth of 4.8TB/s with the A100s. In addition to handling today’s needs, the Supermicro GPU SuperServer SYS-820GP-TNAO is ready for what’s next, with plenty of headroom for higher TDP CPUs and accelerator cards.
Supermicro GPU SuperServer SYS-820GP-TNAO Highlights
The highlight of this box is clearly the support for NVIDIA’s HGX A100 8-GPU SXM4 Multi-GPU Board. That board and associated fans and heatsinks for cooling make up the lower half of the 8U chassis seen above. This box supports CPU-GPU PCIe 4.0 x16 interconnect, and GPU-GPU interconnect via NVIDIA NVLink with NVSwitch.
Cooling is a big deal with GPU systems like this; if thermals get out of control, the system will throttle performance. Supermicro has put significant effort into its dual cooling zones to ensure the GPUs remain operating at peak performance. There are fans at the front and back of the system, in addition to a bank inside the server and a few more in the back. While the primary go-to-market chassis is air-cooled, Supermicro does offer liquid cooling support in this chassis.
The top half of the Supermicro GPU SuperServer SYS-820GP-TNAO is the computer and storage portion of the server.
At launch, this uses a Supermicro Super X12DGO-6 motherboard, with support for two Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs with TDP up to 270W. The board also offers 32 DDR4 DIMM slots, which translates to a max DRAM footprint of 8TB (LRDIMMs).
The motherboard also offers 10 PCIe slots, all PCIe4 x16 LP, including AIOM/OCP 3.0 support. These slots are split into two banks on the back of the system and are ready for NICs or a wide variety of accelerator cards. In terms of storage, the system supports six drives in the front (tri-mode) and an optional set of four NVMe bays on the back. Some of the SSD bays also support NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage. There is M.2 onboard for boot duty.
A single 6000W OCP-compliant power supply provides power. In addition, the system supports both AC and DC Power, including support for standard OCP DC rack configurations.
Our Perspective
Supermicro is listening to customers in HPC and AI fields who are clamoring for more powerful GPU systems. To date, Supermciro has also been flexible in their Universal GPU line, making it easy to swap out Intel for AMD CPUs, for instance, or NVIDIA SXM GPUs for something else. That means from a few base components, Supermicro can get pretty creative to solve high-end GPU needs.
The only thing that’s strange with the Supermicro GPU SuperServer SYS-820GP-TNAO is that it’s 8U. That’s a very beefy box and something that might be a challenge for those who are rack U-sensitive. Supermicro can configure similar 8-GPU servers in 4U and 5U. There are reasons to go with the 8U chassis though; it’s a little more efficient, it should have better thermals, and there are many more expansion options.
Supermicro is leaning very hard into the GPU server space; in traditional Supermicro form, they have something for everyone. This 8U box appears quite impressive but is perhaps nearing the last hurrah for air-cooled GPUs. These boxes can only get so big and powerful before liquid cooling is the primary solution.
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