From the Editor | Main Blog Index
June 03, 2008
With HP's rollout of the new ProLiant BL2x220c G5 today, the company has an answer for IBM's recently announced iDataPlex server. Both are extra-dense server architectures designed for scaled out datacenters. That means these boxes are aimed at cloud computing, Web 2.0 and high performance computing, the current hot markets in the IT industry. In this ultra-scale arena, compute density, energy efficiency and price-performance all seem to be converging. Hardware reliability takes a back seat to being able to quickly swap out fried parts.
In our coverage today John West specs out the new HP gear:
HP is announcing the Xeon-based HP ProLiant BL2x220c G5 blade. This blade allows HP to cram over 12 TFLOPS (1,024 quad-core sockets) into a single 42U rack, a very dense solution. This density comes with a lot of engineering and at the price of some functionality. Of course HP has put in their custom fan kit, and the BladeSystem that holds the new C-class compliant G5 blade is engineered for effective (air) cooling and does some smart power supply management to keep operations at the knee of the efficiency curve.
HP gets two dual-socket servers on a single blade by carefully selecting what makes it in the design and what gets left out. You can choose from the dual-core Xeon 5200 or quad-core Xeon 5400, each with 4 DDR2 DIMMs per blade. HP saves power using DDR2 instead of the FBDIMMs more commonly seen in Intel-based servers and by having 4 DIMM slots instead of 8. Each server also has only one PCI-Express mezzanine socket and one disk drive. These design tradeoffs obviously mean that the new blade isn't the right compute foundation for every task -- in particular a maxed out quad-core solution would be light on memory per core -- but HP is very specifically focusing this product for the customer that wants a lot of compute in a small space.
And from last week, John extols the virtues of iDataPlex:
An iDataPlex setup holds the nodes sideways from the usual orientation, and combines two racks worth of them in a package that's wider than deep. Fans are in the back, but with a shorter distance to pull the cold air across, they use less power and keep components cooler. The iDataPlex is designed for a crowd that values price and quantity over reliability and other such fancy features. The system has fewer redundant components and a simpler design that favors a "pull and replace" approach to node failure over the traditional "predict and manage" approach.
IBM will offer up to 22 different chips and motherboard combinations for the nodes, allowing customers to tailor systems precisely for their needs. You want low power Xeons with slow memory? No problem. Or, for a no-frills-added HPC machine, you can max out on computing power and memory in a full rack of these, and keep it cool with optional water-cooled rear doors.
The final details on the iDataPlex will be forthcoming when Big Blue rolls out their new offering in June. The new ProLiant blade is available now.
Posted by Michael Feldman - June 02, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
![]()
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
No Recent Blog Comments
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.