Standardizing a wide array of hardware subsystems enables the flexibility to create and deliver application-optimized solutions

The COMPUTEX 2022 CEO Keynote series continued on Wednesday with Charles Liang, the founder, president, CEO and chairman of IT hardware giant Supermicro. Liang provided an overview of the market, identified recent innovations and highlighted the importance of green computing.

Recent global challenges have required technology companies to innovate faster than ever, Liang said.

These innovations have resulted in the massive growth of scale in AI, cloud, edge computing and 5G, as well as highly compute-intensive applications like metaverse and Omniverse, he said.

“Supermicro’s Building Block Solutions happen to be the best tool to design and produce application-optimized solutions,” Liang said.

After “painstaking design, optimization [and] rigorous testing,” these Building Blocks are used to create Supermicro’s broad portfolio of workload-optimized solutions for AI, cloud and edge computing, storage, 5G and other segments, Liang said.

Thanks to efficient collaboration, these solutions are delivered with time-to-market and cost advantages, he said.

Amid supply chain challenges, “the ability to quickly create new products with alternative parts that are not in shortage has proven to be of tremendous value to our customers,” Liang said.

“We now have the capability to design, produce and ship more than 3,000 plug and play racks per month worldwide,” he said.

One of the most challenging and fastest-growing markets is AI, which has become an “integral part of our everyday life,” Liang said.

Product manager Josh Grossman explained how Supermicro has created the most optimized, flexible GPU server platform available on the market. Supermicro’s Universal GPU solution is a single system design that supports every major GPU, CPU and fabric for “future-proof modularity and flexibility.”

Nvidia vice president of global partners Kevin Connors detailed how the tech giant has collaborated with Supermicro on Nvidia-certified systems designed and tested to provide customers with the performance they expect.

Supermicro is also one of the launch partners for Nvidia OVX, a purpose-built Omniverse computing system designed to run applications such as digital twins, he said.

The discussion then turned toward green computing, and how in addition to benefiting the environment, there are also financial benefits.

“Green computing is not just about running data centers in the most energy-efficient way and using fewer natural resources, it’s also about reducing e-waste,” Intel IT chief technology officer Shesha Krishnapura said, adding that Supermicro’s disaggregated servers not only cut down on e-waste, but also reduce acquisition, production and upgrade costs.

“Many customers are happily surprised that Supermicro’s green computing solutions do not cost them anything extra” in terms of initial hardware acquisition costs, Liang said.

“If half of the world’s data centers used green computing solutions from Supermicro,” it would save more than US$7 billion in global energy costs and remove 30 fossil fuel power plants, Liang said.