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Supercomputing 2006 Last Day Exhibit Hall
The Exhibit hall was again filled with attendees and we got a chance to see even more that we had previously missed. AMD was showing off a liquid cooled server array that was using Angstron AMS Treon Cooling Fluid. now liquid cooling is not new nor is its use in servers but it is still not common to see and its always an eye catcher to see it used in real world applications. The display had a PC motherboard and screen immersed in the clear fluid while an enire array below was utilizing the cooling power of Treon fluid. We snapped a few shots for you of course.
We stopped by the Asus area to check out their collection of desktop and rack mount server platforms. Their systems were some of the cleanest and airflow optimized setups that we saw at this years SC06.
We hope to bring you testing of their desktop and server solutions very soon.
Storage:
Storage Area Networks are big this year with nearly every OEM and vendor having a market offering. It was not uncommon to see SAN's offered starting at 10TB through 1000TB or more. Connectivity and speed remain issues with SAN's and each vendor had its unique solution to these problems. Almost all of the vendors have jumped aboard the SATA bandwagon while many still offer SCSI and very few offered IDE.
Unless you are highly familiar with servers and HPC it's difficult to take yourself out of the role as a desktop or workstation user to comprehend the speed and numbers being thrown at you at SC06. The ability of the hardware here to record and serve data is phenominal. They often operate so quick that fiber optic cable is necessary to transport the data to and from them. Many vendors had on display arrays of blades and servers in a rack that were made up of several hundred hard drives. Another product gaining in popularity are the 2.5 inch drive arrays that can fit into much smaller spaces. While these array's usually operate at a much slower speed than a typical drive and have a MTBF that is lower, they still offer to fill a gap for those with space concerns. Hitachi and Seagate were two two most popular drives present in those arrays we saw.
Another technology on display at SC06 and gaining popularity are storage servers. Xtore (Shown Above) has many solutions of varying size, capacity, and speed that utilize hard drives in an array to offer networkable storage to businesses with expanding needs. Xtore specializes in delivering white box storage systems, subsystems and data protection solutions to the OEM and solution provider markets. SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), WSS (Windows Storage Server), Raid DAS (Direct Attached Storage) and other technologies were on display from Xtore at reasonable prices. What is perhaps most eye catching about Xtore is the space requirements for their storage offerings. They have solutions that range from 2 bay mini-towers to a 48 Bay 4U design that can support up to 24TB of storage for businesses with high storage needs. We hope to bring you an in depth review of their offerings starting with their 4 Bay WSS design and move upwards.
Observations of SC06 Attendees:
Rivaling CES and Computex almost 70-80 percent of attendees carried notebooks at SC06. It was a 40/30 split between Dell and Apple with Dell being the majority of notebooks present. The remaining 30% was broken between Samsung, Panasonic, and IBM in that order. Considering that many of the vendors present were from Asian countries it was not surprising to see this. I have personally never attended a trade show where so many people were online at the same time. Everywhere you looked there were attendeed crowding around electric sockets and at tables, sitting on the floor, and on benches using a notebook. The exhibit hall probably had close to 1000 servers, mainframes, and cluster servers all running at the same time and we found it interesting that the power never flickered once. Either the power consumption of these HPC's is decreasing or that hall has some serious power breakers installed.
If you are to take anything away from this article and TechwareLabs coverage, it would be that the need for computing power never decreases. Vendors realize that the demand for power in an ever decreasing space, energy consumption, and price is growing. The HPC's and SC06 show a serious attempt by all vendors to meet the demand and exceed the computing power of their competition. There are not only OEM's and Vendors offering their unique solutions but there also seems to be a growing demand for integrators ready to put together a system ready to run with the software/OS already installed and configured. Several booths represented companies aimed at fulfilling just this specific need. The technology world is not idle and seems to be growing as fast as is possible for the hardware manufacturers to keep pace with.
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