HPCwire: Accelerators in the Data Center -- Green Is In

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October 10, 2008

Accelerators in the Data Center -- Green Is In

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In the data center, the quest for greater performance -- while keeping power, cooling and space concerns in check -- is providing significant challenges for companies. According to a recent Environmental Protection Agency report, power use in data centers doubled from 2000 to 2006 and now accounts for about 1.5 percent of U.S. electricity consumption. Faced with an array of increasing complex challenges, data center managers may do well to take a look at hardware accelerators as a means to achieve more application performance, in less space and with less power.

Accelerators offer scientists, engineers and analysts a way to offload computationally intensive sections of applications to co-processors that are designed to perform a subset of the functions of a general purpose processor, but run them at higher speed, providing massive jumps in performance. In addition, these processors, specialized for computational tasks, consume less power and cooling resources while dramatically reducing the footprint in the data center.

"Accelerators can help address the need for higher performance with more efficient use of power and space, saving data center resources" says Glenn Lupton, engineering team leader in HP's Accelerator Program.

Question: There are a number of accelerators in the market today. Can you give us a breakdown by type?

Lupton: One of the most common accelerators in use today are Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), highly parallel processors capable of 100's of gigaflops per second that were originally designed to accelerate graphics applications, but now include special features for high-performance parallel computing. Competition among the GPU vendors for market share in the personal computer (PC) graphics gaming market has driven technological advancements in graphics cards. Researchers have been investigating their usage for high performance computing for a number of years with success in many areas with large-scale deployments starting this year. Both AMD and NVIDIA have product lines specialized for high-performance computing, specifically NVIDIA Tesla and AMD Stream. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have a history of being used to implement special purpose circuits. They are now being applied to high performance computing problems. Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) provide custom silicon for accelerating high performance computing.

Question: What are the advantages of GPU-based accelerators?

Lupton: The latest NVIDIA Tesla GPUs can provide up to a teraflop of performance in a single GPU, theoretically. In 2U of rack space, you can put a 1U dual quad core server and a 1U GPU box with 4 GPUs, giving you potentially over 4 teraflops in 2U.

GPUs offer a lot of computing power for the amount of rack space that they occupy, but GPUs benefit from host servers that can deliver multiple, high-bandwidth PCI Express slots. Not many servers can meet these requirements. The combination of the HP DL160G5 1U server and the NVIDIA Tesla S870 and its follow-on, the Tesla S1070, is an excellent match of server with GPU and customers can team one or two DL160's with the S870, depending on the ratio of GPUs to CPUs needed for an application.

The GPU vendors, NVIDIA and AMD/ATI, are providing programming tools and libraries for their specific products. An alternative, RapidMind, provides a product for programming both GPU and multi-core targets.

Question: What do custom ASIC accelerators offer?

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