Contributors: Micha vor dem Berge, Jens Hagemeyer, Joao Costa

The M2DC team was part of the most important HPC events this Summer - the Forum Teratec in Paris (300 visitors/2 days) and the ISC-HPC in Frankfurt (250 visitors/3 days). Both are major industrial and R&D events in HPC in Europe. Teratec brings together the best international experts in HPC, simulation and Big Data, with more than 1300 attendees. ISC-HPC is a large-scale event that brings together over 3500 researchers and commercial users, and 150 exhibitors, the European counterpart of the Supercomputing conference (SC) in the USA.

In both of these events the M2DC team brought to public the platform chassis in the small and middle-size versions. The system efficiency enhancements (SEE), one of the highlights of this novel and outstanding technology, were demonstrated at the booth, as a component  of the demonstrated appliances. The audiences were very enthusiastic about the high-speed, low-latency communication with PCI-Express switching technology, its middleware concept, the integration and usage of FPGAs in HPC, the use of low power GPU microservers, and the heterogeneous nature of the server.

M2DC rightly recognises that homogeneous, commodity architectures will not be sufficient to meet the compute requirements of the next generation of IT workloads. The goals of M2DC fit well with the current push to develop new, highly efficient, heterogeneous application-specific architectures for emerging workloads such as IoT, machine and deep learning, and big data analytics. Built-in efficiency and dependability enhancements are combined with an intelligent power management for continuous optimization of power and performance.

The M2DC image scaling appliance together with the CEWE photo printer were the biggest eyecatchers. Easy to understand and to showcase, visually attractive and showing enormous improvements in both, energy efficiency, computing speed/throughput and scalability. Other M2DC highlights were: the in house flexibility  (as an alternative to the use of cloud resources, especially when variety of hardware architecture is needed); the potential to combine different types of microservers and accelerators in a single system; the hot swapping of all major hardware parts. Of particular interest were the discussions on the use of M2DC for remote gaming (game as a service), over an appliance with High Availability (HA) features (redundancy, nodes with higher reliability for important tasks), and the real savings in the long term (with a reasonable return of investment).

The M2DC team will also be part of the Supercomputing 2018 (SC18) in Dallas, USA, in November 11-16, the ICT 2018: Imagine Digital - Connect Europe in December 4-6 in Vienna, and in the ISC-HPC and Teratec in 2019. Join us at these events or contact us at m2dc.eu and through our social media channels to discuss the future of HPC and how M2DC technology is taking a big part of it!