With data center operators’ requirements for faster access to massive amounts of data than ever before, the choice of storage technologies and associated infrastructure has become a critical consideration when IT departments design and implement their next-generation data centers. As storage technologies continue to increase in both performance and capacity, some decisions need to be made to deliver fast results to enterprise customers.

High Performance Computing (HPC) can enable humans to understand the world around us, from atomic behaviour to how the universe is expanding. While HPC used to be associated with a “supercomputer,” today’s HPC environments are created using hundreds to thousands of individual servers, connected by a high speed and low latency networking fabric. To take advantage of thousands of separate computing elements or “cores” simultaneously, applications need to be designed and implemented to work in parallel, sharing intermediate results as required.

The Supermicro AOC-S100GC-i2C is perhaps one of the most interesting NICs that is on the market today. This is a dual 100GbE solution designed for Supermicro servers. What is somewhat different is that this NIC uses the Intel 800 series or Columbiaville networking first announced in 2019. Intel went into production in the summer of 2020 so this is one of the first NICs out there with Intel’s new “foundational” NIC stack. There are some major benefits and changes to Intel’s networking offering here.