Authors: Ariel Oleksiak (PSNC)

2018’s edition of the International Conference of High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18) - known as Supercomputing  - took place in Dallas, Texas, November 11-16 at the Kay Baley Hutchinson Convention Center. It included the worldwide technology fair in November 12-15. This is an annual event of great importance to the world of HPC, with the support of sigHPC, ACM, IEEE, and TCHPC.

The M2DC team was present once more at this great event, bringing the latest version of its M2DC server, system efficiency enhancements and appliances, and to demo and discuss those in further detail. It was represented in several of the Consortium partner’s booths - CEA (#2004), RXC (#731) and PSNC (#1015) - to discuss with the visitors the future of heterogeneous, modular microserver technology.

At the PSNC booth, SC18 visitors had a chance to see the full-size M2DC chassis and an ARM-based microserver node. At the Reflex booth with the small chassis and the Stratix 10 microserver nodes were presented. The visitors also had the opportunity to experience a live demonstration of the cloud appliance (you can read more about this appliance here). By this demonstration, we showed how scalable Platform as a Service can be integrated with machine learning and power management features using M2DC heterogeneous microserver platform. The preconfigured appliance was using the OpenShift and a machine learning application along with the power capping mechanism, using nodes from the PSNC testbed remotely.

The SC18 exhibition was a great opportunity to meet potential users and partners. They expressed interest in heterogeneous architecture possibilities and in the results of ARM microservers. Some of the contacts provided new collaboration opportunities, for example, innovative ways of cooling and other future development or application ideas. We are looking forward events of great quality such as this where the future is happening now.