Nov. 18 — It is a new family of HPC systems, built on the innovative “Brick” supercomputing architecture, recently presented at ISC14, that promises to raise the bar for acceleration, optimization and flexibility. The Hive HPC systems are optimized for accelerated workloads, offering performance and energy efficiency at levels rarely seen before. This is obtained by a high degree of modularity in conjunction with the water cooling of all components.

The system is configured to adapt to different applications, avoiding unnecessary components and focusing on the choice of elements providing maximum performance to the specific customer workload. One system module can host a combination of ARM-64 or x86 CPUs, Intel or NVIDIA GPU accelerators as well as other PCIe components. Modules are innovative form factor, hot water cooled enclosures supporting different configurations of the components. They provide computation and control functionality (Intel or ARM processor), acceleration (up to 5 Intel Phi or NVIDIA GPU accelerators), Infiniband network and additional optional functionality of storage and visualization.

These modules are logical nodes of a large system. The nodes are hosted in the Aurora Hive rack in any combination up to 128 per cabinet. The High Speed Interconnect allows scaling to any size system with density up to 750 TFlop/s DP per m2. “Eurotech’s Aurora Tigon systems are well known for their industry-leading energy efficiency,” says Fabio Gallo, Eurotech HPC BU managing director. “With the introduction of Aurora Hive Eurotech is yet again raising the bar in accelerated computing, delivering a whole new level of energy efficiency and density. Aurora Hive systems are a bold step in the path leading to technologically viable and affordable Exascale systems.”

The combination of low power processors (Intel Haswell E3 up to 80 W TDP or Applied Micro X Gene ARM 64 bit) and “energy aware” design makes the system extremely energy efficient, with theoretical values of 5 GFlops/Watt. In addition, the Hive is entirely hot water cooled, allowing the highest energy efficiency not only at machine level, but also at datacentre level. In this way, a datacentre could aim at a PUE on the 1.05 mark.

The Aurora Hive systems are equipped with the 2nd generation of the acknowledged Aurora Direct Hot Water Cooling, a technology that puts the coolers in direct contact with components like processors and memories. Compared to the previous cooling generation, the new technology has the benefits of lighter and more compact cooling elements, allowing an extremely dense packaging inside computational module of only 130 x 105 x 325 mm. To take advantage of GPU/Phi acceleration on Intel and ARM architectures, Eurotech is working to validate and tune the Hive configurations for a wide range of accelerated applications in a number of market segments, including high energy physics (QCD), bioinformatics, molecular dynamics, CAE, machine learning, finance, GPU-based rendering and seismic migration.

The Hive configuration with Intel E3 Haswell 3rd generation processors and Intel Phi co processors is available for ordering now, while additional configurations with Intel or APM X-Gene ARM-64 and NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerators will be available for ordering Q2 2015. The development kits of all of the mentioned configurations will be available Q1 2015. To satisfy other markets, Eurotech engineering services combine a variety of out-of-box modules to provide systems that fit specific application needs.

About Eurotech

Eurotech is a listed global company that integrates hardware, software, services and expertise to deliver embedded computing platforms and sub-systems to leading OEMs, system integrators and enterprise customers for successful and efficient deployment of their products and services. Drawing on concepts of minimalist computing, Eurotech lowers power draw, minimizes physical size and reduces coding complexity to bring sensors, embedded platforms, sub-systems, ready-to-use devices and high performance computers to market, specializing in defense, transportation, industrial and medical segments. By combining domain expertise in wireless connectivity as well as communications protocols, Eurotech architects platforms that simplify data capture, processing and transfer over unified communications networks. Our customers rely on us to simplify their access to state-of-the-art embedded technologies so they can focus on their core competencies.

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Source: Eurotech