Vicor 48V solutions lead the world in supercomputing and was invited to attend the 5th China Supercomputing Center CEO Joint Conference

The "overall acceleration" of global supercomputers has become a major trend, and China's overall research and development capabilities of supercomputer systems have reached the international leading level. Vicor was invited to attend the China Supercomputing Summit held in Jinan on November 2. Huang Ruowei, Managing Director of Asia Pacific and Vice President of Marketing, shared mature, reliable and efficient power conversion solutions with the industry.

(Left) Huang Ruowei Managing Director of Asia Pacific and Vice President of Marketing

I am very pleased that my country's supercomputers are developing so rapidly. In just a few years, China's supercomputer systems have occupied half of the top 500 list, and have occupied the top spot for several years. Now it is the United States and Japan that need to catch up. In the past few years when domestic supercomputers have risen, Vicor has had contact with major domestic supercomputer providers and is well aware of the hardships and difficulties involved. I learned from the media that high-speed rail and large aircraft are important specific applications of supercomputers, as well as pharmaceuticals, weather and other aspects that are closely related to people. The widespread application of supercomputers has facilitated the lives of ordinary people and made important contributions to the development of science and technology in my country. Salute to all supercomputer technology workers.

The East is the key to global development, and China is the key to the East. On the fast track of development, more and more powerful supercomputing centers will emerge in succession to solve more complex computing problems. As a deep participant in supercomputing, Vicor will also contribute its advanced supercomputing power supply technology, catch the express train of development, and share the fruits of development.

Vicor's relationship with supercomputers began with brick power supplies. Since the 1990s, our second-generation 500W bricks have been providing a steady stream of power for domestic supercomputer systems. Entering the new century, in 2005, Vicor launched the innovative FPA architecture (factored power), which is completely different from the previous CPA or DPA power architecture. It separates voltage regulation and isolation transformation, bringing very good flexibility, especially suitable for low-voltage and high-current applications. Since 2006, Vicor's solution has been used in IBM's P6 supercomputer. Directly powering the CPU from 48V is a milestone in the application of power architecture. Now we see that some data centers are starting to switch to 48V power supply, which should actually be traced back to here. In the subsequent BlueGene series supercomputer systems, Vicor's solution is also the hero behind the surging performance. The following list is Vicor's application in IBM supercomputer systems. From blueGene P to Q, from P6 to P9. Not only that, IBM has also adopted high-voltage DC power supply solutions very early, and now high-voltage DC has also entered ordinary data centers. We can't help but admire IBM's technological foresight. In the high-voltage DC power supply mode, Vicor's high-voltage bus converter converts 350V to about 48V, and then directly transfers 48V to the CPU. This power supply architecture greatly helps improve its power efficiency.

Cray, another famous supercomputer company in the United States, also uses Vicor's high-voltage DC input module and FPA architecture to power the CPU, reducing the loss of the entire system. Its latest 4-way motherboard uses 4 sets of Vicor VR13 solutions. In Vicor's latest press release, Japan's Pezy's latest supercomputer system also uses this architecture. Its ZettaScaler-1.8 system uses 6 high-voltage BCMs per channel to convert from 380V to 48V, and then uses FPA to directly power the 1V CPU with 1024 cores from 48V, instead of the traditional 12V bus. In order to obtain the highest power efficiency, a PRM and two VTMs are used to power the CPU. There are 32 CPUs per channel, 24 channels in the whole system, and 768 CPUs in the whole machine. The system has a total power of about 70KW and is completely immersed in a 0.75 cubic meter coolant tank. Due to the use of Vicor's high-power and high-density power supply component solution, the machine has achieved an amazing 1.5 quadrillion high-density floating-point computing power per cubic meter. According to the ratio of computing speed to power consumption, the GFLOPs/W of this system is about 16 GFLOPs/W, which exceeds the current top 1 value. According to the information disclosed by the company, the next generation system ZettaScaler-2.0, which is planned to be released this year and uses the same structure, will increase its computing density by three times. A detailed video of the system can be seen on the Vicor official website.

It uses high-voltage DC input, converts it to 48V through an efficient bus converter, and then uses 48V to power low-voltage, high-current loads. This is a very mature, reliable and efficient power supply path for supercomputers.

An important application area of ​​domestic supercomputers is Internet computing. We have seen that among the top 10 supercomputer systems in China, 4 are used for big data Internet cloud computing. In addition, the development of data centers themselves is extremely rapid, and power consumption is also growing rapidly. In terms of scale, the difference between data centers and supercomputers has become smaller and smaller. Initially, the rack power of data centers was roughly 6KW. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence deep learning, similar to supercomputers, GPU resources are widely used in systems, which has led to a surge in energy consumption in advanced data centers. At this year's ODCC conference, we heard Alibaba's infrastructure general manager mention that their GPU-based rack power will soon reach 44K, which is equivalent to the current supercomputer density. As a commercial company, in order to cope with such high power consumption, they have made many changes in the power supply architecture. At present, the largest search engine company in China has begun testing servers based on Vicor's 48V solution, and has clearly stated that in order to reduce energy loss and save operating expenses, their next-generation artificial intelligence data center will adopt a 48V bus power supply solution. Google has adopted the 48V system for many years, which has brought good economic effects. According to data from Google's vice president, compared with the 12V bus system used before, the 48V system reduces losses by 30%. If this loss is placed in a supercomputing center, the economic benefits will be huge.

Vicor has gained a lot from its efforts in supercomputing over the years and firmly believes that supercomputing applications are an important application direction for our company. During these years of efforts, we have also gained some preliminary understanding of the demand for supercomputing and its future development.

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