Chances are that Tyan-based servers have reliably processed many of your Internet activities today and will power your HPC jobs in the future. Tyan servers provide the must-have storage and computational uptime and performance capabilities for many well-known Internet and cloud providers such as Twitter and Amazon Web Services (AWS). New Tyan products such as the quad-socket FT76-B7922 redefine what is possible when running an ambient air cooled server that can still meet the needs of a high-performance, high-uptime organization.

The Tyan FT76-B7922 is the first ambient air cooled, multi-purpose server platform that can simultaneously scale-up to a six terabyte (6×10¹² byte) fat node, scale-out to a many-core CPU node containing four Intel® Xeon® E7-4800 v3/v4 CPUs, and act as a large-scale hybrid computing engine containing either four Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors, or four GPUs. For those who need more hybrid computing capability, the FT77C-B7079 supports up to eight GPU accelerators or Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors – also in a 4U, air-cooled enclosure.

Having the ability to put six terabytes of memory in a single server dramatically redefines the capabilities of a fat node. Jim Jeffers (Engineering Manager & PE, Visualization Engineering at Intel) noted in his Dec. 2015 HPCwire editorial, “CPUs Sometimes Best for Big Data Visualization”, that just one three terabyte system can match the visualization performance of a 120- to 200-GPU visualization cluster on large visualization data sets! Obviously, the price/performance and performance/watt ratios strongly favor the purchase of a single Tyan FT76-B7922 over a large GPU visualization cluster. No machine room required! Further, six terabytes of RAM also means that a single FT76-B7922 fat node can dramatically accelerate database operations for both for both scientific and commercial HPC users.

From a compute perspective, the FT76-B7922 is unique in that it offers quad-socket Intel Xeon multi-core performance that includes a 1:1 CPU to GPU or 1:1 CPU to Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor ratio. This lets the customer configure the system as they wish to balance both task- and data-parallelism in both multi-core and hybrid environments.

With its large memory, many cores, and 1:1 CPU to GPU or Intel Xeon Phi device ratios, each FT76-B7922 provides an ideal virtualization platform that can be configured with exactly the right hardware characteristics. Need big memory virtual machines? Six terabytes should be sufficient. Need to run high performance hybrid codes on either GPUs or coprocessors? The 1:1 CPU to device ratio can make that happen. Need to concurrently run a mix of both large database and hybrid virtual machines? No problem as a single FT76-B7922 can be configured to support both types of virtual machines at the same time.

Tyan also offers more compact products in 1U and 2U form factors:

• TA80-B7071: This 2U platform is widely-adopted by mainstream parallel processing cluster deployments as it accommodates dual top-bin Intel® Xeon® E5-2699 v3/v4 CPUs and four GPUs or Intel® Xeon Phi™ 7120P/5110P/3120P devices. This enclosure is designed to run at ambient temperatures as high as 35°C.  Power redundancy is supported for higher system reliability and availability.
• GA80-B7081: The 1U GA80-B7081 is designed for smaller scale, educational GPU cluster deployment. It accommodates up to dual Intel® Xeon® E5-2698 v3/v4 CPUs and three GPUs or Intel® Xeon Phi™ 7120P/5110P/3120P devices. The enclosure is designed to run at ambient temperatures as high as 25°C. Power redundancy is supported for higher system reliability and availability. This device makes an excellent fit for ISVs, universities, and similar buyers looking for parallelized application development or proof of concept (PoC) solution deployment.

Of course, HPC computing is also big data computing, which means that performance, cost effective, and reliable storage is a key requirement. In addition, many HPC users are moving to a cloud framework, either on internal resources or via external providers such as AWS.

Tyan offers a wide range of products that support tiered datacenter applications. By offering multiple configurations of different products, the GF83-B7074 for example, Tyan can deliver to the customer a single platform that can handle Cold, Hot, or Cached Data storage needs. Xeon E5 based platforms such as the GF83-B7074 can meet the needs of cloud-based Hadoop applications, while the lowered-powered Xeon D-1500 based GT62B-B5539 provide low wattage access to high performance NVME storage devices.

Looking ahead, Tyan’s success with AWS and other cloud providers will certainly pave the way for future HPC success stories. According to Earl Joseph, VP for High Performance Computing at International Data Corporation (IDC), the HPC community appears to have transitioned from the experimental to an applied phase for cloud computing. The expectation is that 2016 will demonstrate an accelerated consumption of cloud computing by the commercial, government, and academic HPC communities. This means Tyan has the proven track record to meet both current cluster and any future HPC cloud needs.

In the end, it is Tyan’s willingness to work with customers that makes it a name that must be considered for HPC procurements.

Tyan recognizes that not all customer needs can be completely met by off the shelf products, which is why they offer both technical support and project management for custom projects. Specifically, customers can work directly with Tyan to create custom systems. This support extends across the complete system level that includes both firmware and hardware customizations. Example customers include white box retailers who incorporate Tyan devices in their products and organizations who choose to procure directly from Tyan. Customization, in combination with proven reliability and performance, can make all the difference in winning a procurement because the customer gets exactly what they want, and configured to boot as they wish, rather than accepting a COTS (Commodity off the Shelf) solution that they must then spend time and money configuring to meet their needs.

For more information about Tyan scientific and commercial HPC compute as well as storage solutions, please go to http://www.tyan.com.

Rob Farber is a global technology consultant and author with an extensive background in scientific and commercial HPC having worked with both national labs and corporations. He can be reached at [email protected].