HPCwire: Enabling Low-TCO Supercomputers Through 'Scalable Units'

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November 09, 2007

Enabling Low-TCO Supercomputers Through 'Scalable Units'

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The quest for greater performance at lower costs has propelled clusters to the forefront of high-performance computing. Still, HPC users are demanding continually better reliability, availability, flexibility, compatibility, power efficiency – and of course price/performance. Responding to these demands, Appro has introduced the Appro Xtreme-X(TM) Supercomputing Series, which takes advantage of the concept of "Scalable Units" to create next-generation clusters with supercomputer performance.

"High-performance clustering technologies are maturing, and scalability and availability are becoming crucial elements for critical business functions in HPC organizations," says Jim Ballew, Appro's CTO. "In designing our new Xtreme-X Supercomputer Series, Appro has taken the cluster concept to the next plane of both performance and cost advantages."

Question: What is a Scalable Unit for HPC – and how can you call this a Supercomputer?

Ballew: Scalable Units (SUs) are basic building blocks needed to meet specific computational requirements. With this basic modular concept, clusters of various sizes can be built and deployed very rapidly. The SU concept is based on a flexible architecture that groups together clusters with the same configuration to make a unified, fully integrated single "entity" that can be provisioned and managed as a stand-alone supercomputer system to deliver performance up to 1000TF.

Question: What are the advantages of this approach?

Ballew: One main advantage is total cost of ownership (TCO). By making a volume purchase of SUs and using them for a specific job, you can achieve economies of scale that exceed the purchase of a single large system.

Question: How are Scalable Units different from "regular" clusters?

Ballew: It has to do with the way SUs can be grouped together – assembled to make a unified, fully integrated single entity. At the same time, you gain all the benefits of clusters. You will see results in real time. The sum of multiple SUs unified in this way is greater than the value of its cluster parts added together separately.

Question: How does Appro apply this Scalable Unit concept in the Xtreme-X Supercomputer series?

Ballew: The Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer series offer a next-generation platform based on SU clusters, a "building block" IT infrastructure with a cost-effective, energy-efficient and scalable architecture. The Appro Xtreme-X series is designed to scale out data centers for medium to large-scale enterprises and HPC deployments ranging from 6TF to more than 1000TF of computing power. It arrives as a fully integrated solution, completely pre-packaged, which simplifies the configuration for a particular computational requirement.

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