Crazy Canucks heat their lab with muahaha-capable server

Supermicro 2028GR-TRT quad GPU box

Additional considerations

We're working with several Register readers in Canada to provide them access to this system for projects they are working on. These range from GIS rendering projects to GPU acceleration of Postgres databases to rendering images from petrogeo sounding into imagery.

Being blunt, most of this is way beyond us but the sysadmins involved have basically wet themselves then started rocking back and forth saying "wow" over and over as they get the initial test results. Those nVidia K40s are a big hit*. They also impose some design considerations that need to be borne in mind.

While one of these units can change everything from the small Canadian startups we're working with, there is a good chance that most of the 2028GR-TRTs that Supermicro sells will be sold by the rack. At 2,000W of peak power for 2U, the power budget for this system is also pretty high.

A 42U rack of these things is 20 units (assuming 2U for networking). That's 40kW per rack. That's nuts. Many datacenters struggle to deliver 30kW to a rack. At 40kW not only will power be a consideration, but cooling in a data center will likely have to be overhauled.

Another consideration is enterprise level support. Every time we write a Supermicro review someone jumps out with the tired refrain that Supermicro shouldn't be purchased because they don't offer enterprise support. This is wrong.

Supermicro has acknowledged the benefits of round-the-clock support that companies like Dell are famous for, and provide 4-hour enterprise support should you need it. This is keeping in line with Supermicro's push to move upmarket while still undercutting their competition as much as possible.

The 2028GR-TRT s is serious hardware, and Supermicro promises me they are ready to provide the full gamut of support for it. Need a supercomputer in a can? This is the unit for you. Looking to build an entire data center full of the craziest high end gear imaginable? This is probably also the unit for you.

You could easily cram four nVidia GRID cards in here and make a crazy VDI box. You can use Tesla or Firepro cards to make an HPC unit. Some databases can use GPUs and – along with the 8 drive slots and onboard RAID controller – you can get some fantastically high end number crunching.

But there really isn't much else to do with it. This is a drag racer, not a sedan. The 2028GR-TRT is niche hardware, but it's the sort of gloriously overpowered niche hardware that reminds us all that technology can indeed be fun.

Happy sysadmin day, everyone. I hope you get to play with kickass hardware from time to time as well. ®

Bootnote

* We have a 16GB Firepro S9150 as well, and that gets even more wows per second. It's proving harder to test, however, as there is so much out there written for CUDA and precious little for OpenCL. If you have any projects in mind that you'd like to test on this hardware, please do ping us and we'll see if we can set something up.