SAN DIEGO, Calif., June 1, 2022 — GigaIO, provider of an open rack-scale computing platform for advanced scale workflows, has announced the launch of a new composability appliance. The GigaIO Composability Appliance: University Edition, powered by AMD, is a flexible environment for heterogeneous compute designed for Higher Education that can easily accommodate the different workloads required for teaching, professor research, and grad-student research. Future iterations of the appliance will bring the benefits of composability to Manufacturing and Life Science users over the coming year.

“With the launch of this rack-scale appliance, we are bringing easy-to-use infrastructure to the classroom, where composability can provide students a wide array of flexible technology for learning and growth,” said Alan Benjamin, CEO of GigaIO. “AMD is the perfect partner for this venture because we share a commitment to create an open, industry standards-based platform. We are keen to make it easy for people to avail themselves of this new technology, and with the experience and success that the company has had in the Higher Ed space, our first joint product with AMD is well positioned for critical success.”

“Composability can supply students with access to a range of the equipment they will use in the real world, so they will be better prepared for the job market,” said Brock Taylor, Director, Global HPC Solutions, AMD. “Our recent joint deployments of composable infrastructure at the San Diego Supercomputing Center at the University of California San Diego and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas, Austin demonstrate the promise of composability to solve complex computational problems.”

The GigaIO Composability Appliance: University Edition, powered by AMD, was built with ease of use in mind, so that it can be used in a classroom or laboratory setting without requiring dedicated IT expertise. It is a complete, highly efficient, future-proofed composable infrastructure solution that provides cloud-like agility to on-prem infrastructure, allowing cloud bursting as needed within a single interface. Flexibility and composability means that systems don’t remain idle while not being used for teaching — they can instead be reconfigured for actual simulation work and swapped back into teaching mode as needed.

For ease of use, the GigaIO Composability Appliance: University Edition is delivered with NVIDIA Bright Cluster Manager pre-installed, combining its ability to easily build and manage clusters with GigaIO’s ability to connect AMD accelerators, AMD-powered servers, and other devices in a seamless dynamic fabric. Native integration of GigaIO’s universal dynamic memory fabric, FabreX, within NVIDIA Bright Cluster Manager allows owners to easily assign configurations prior to use, dividing hardware among students to allow them the experience of running actual simulation workloads on the same compute infrastructure they will utilize upon graduation.

FabreX enables an entire server rack to be treated as a single compute resource, handling all compute communication, including server-to-server traffic (such as MPI and NVMe-oF). Resources normally located inside of a server — including accelerators, storage, and even memory — can now be pooled in accelerator or storage enclosures, where they are available to all of the servers in a rack. These resources and servers continue to communicate over a native PCIe memory fabric for the lowest possible latency and highest possible bandwidth performance, just as they would if they were plugged into the server motherboard.

GigaIO Composability Appliances are designed to accommodate a variety of accelerator types and brands and provide a truly vendor-agnostic environment. The University Edition units are container-ready and easily composed via bare metal, and feature AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI210 accelerators. The GigaIO Composability Appliance: University Edition, powered by AMD, is offered in three configurations and is available now. Learn more.

About GigaIO

Headquartered in Carlsbad, California, GigaIO democratizes AI and HPC architectures by delivering the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). With its universal dynamic infrastructure fabric, FabreX, and its innovative open architecture using industry-standard PCI Express/soon CXL technology, GigaIO breaks the constraints of the server box, liberating resources to shorten time to results. Contact [email protected], and visit www.gigaio.com.

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Source: GigaIO