Meeting AI/ML Compute Needs with the HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus

August 2, 2021

Companies across most verticals, including manufacturing, financial services, retail and the life sciences, are in need of high-octane compute power. They need solutions that can analyze massive amounts of data and compute like supercomputers do. They need workloads that use high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to deliver real-time insights that help their businesses operate more efficiently, respond to changes faster, and innovate.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) offers advanced solutions that provide industry-leading performance and flexibility with enterprise reliability. The HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus Systems deliver exceptional performance, fast insights, and advanced security to fuel better business outcomes. This provides high-density solutions for the most demanding HPC and AI workloads, and utilizes accelerated computing to process data-intensive workloads on GPU architectures.

The HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus System leverages the processing capacity of the latest NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and both 2nd and 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors and AMD Instinct™ MI100 accelerators to empower data-driven innovation and provide choice. The flexible design of the Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus chassis allows for support of either two 1P HPE ProLiant XL645d Gen10 Plus servers or a single 2P HPE ProLiant XL675d Gen10 Plus server so that the right solution can be designed to fit your unique workload requirement.

The AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series processors provide outstanding performance across the wide spectrum of industry-standard applications. Built on the “Zen 3” core and AMD Infinity Architecture, the AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series processors provide a full feature set across the stack with industry-leading I/O bandwidth, 7nm x86 CPU technology, and embedded security features that help you mitigate risk.  AMD EPYC™ 7003 series CPUs provide up to 32MB of L3 cache per core, 4-6-8 memory channel interleaving designed for better economies and performance in multiple DIMM configurations, plus synchronized clocks between fabric and memory, all driving better, faster time to results.

AMD EPYC™ has been engineered for data centers that rely on CPU performance and throughput. From hyper-converged infrastructure to database to big data analytics to high-performance computing, workloads have more cores to work with. AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors scale from 8 to 64 cores (or 16 to 128 threads per socket). No other x86 server processor achieves this level of core density.[i]

Given the importance of today’s workloads, security is a top concern. AMD Infinity Guard is a suite of advanced security features built into the processor die. It is designed to defend against internal and external threats attacking data and to decrease potential attacks that surface as software is booted and executed.  Featuring Secure Encrypted Virtualization technologies strengthened with Secure Nested Paging, the AMD EPYC processor is intended to help business power breakthrough data security advancements, such as confidential computing. Secure Memory Encryption helps to safeguard data in certain physical attacks without an impact to overall system performance.

AMD Instinct MI100 GPUs, powered by the AMD CDNA™ architecture and AMD Infinity Fabric™ technologies, provide industry-leading double precision computational performance for HPC with up to 11.5 TFLOPS peak FP64 performance for your most demanding workloads. The MI100 can support your largest data sets and help eliminate traditional bottlenecks in data movement with 32 Gb HBM2 memory and an ultra-high ~1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth.

The MI100 accelerator also brings all-new Matrix Core Technology supporting a full range of mixed precisions for AI & Machine Learning with superior performance for whatever combination of workloads you need to deploy in your data center. In addition, AMD Instinct™ GPUs are supported by the hyperscale class ROCm™ open software platform bringing developers and customers choice and an open stack for programing innovation.

NVIDIA A100 GPUs ensure low latency at high throughput to enhance these powerful accelerated computing solutions. In addition, with third-generation Tensor Cores, the NVIDIA A100 can efficiently scale up to thousands of GPUs, or, with NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) technology, can be divided into seven isolated GPU instances to accelerate diverse workloads.

HPE systems leverage CPU-GPU heterogeneous compute for a broad range of mission-critical HPC/AI applications. The HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus System maximizes GPU utilization with up to 16 GPUs per server to rapidly capture, analyze, and operationalize intelligence, regardless of the HPC and AI workload requirements. NVIDIA NVLink establishes a seamless connection between GPUs to work together as a single robust accelerator. NVLink interconnects provide dedicated communication, which enables memory to migrate from GPU to GPU. A single A100 supports up to 12 NVLink connections for a total bandwidth of 600 gigabytes per second.

Enter MLPerf

Businesses need a way to compare solutions for their mixed workloads. MLPerf Inference is an emerging benchmark that has garnered wide industry approval to asset solution performance. Developed by MLPerf.org, a group comprised of 50+ technology and academic leaders, the MLPerf Inference is a machine learning inference performance benchmark suite that measures how fast systems can process inputs and produce results using a trained model.

Two HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus Systems were recently tested in a quarterly industry roundup coordinated by MLPerf.org. The tests evaluated performance for common AI/ML tasks, including image classification, object detection, speech-to-text, natural language processing, recommendations, and more. The HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus with the HPE ProLiant XL645d Gen10 Plus Server outperformed all other similarly-equipped systems across all categories.

Contributing to the results, 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors offer tremendous bandwidth and a high core count to continuously feed data-hungry GPUs. These high-frequency processors integrated with NIVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand add up to 200 gigabits per second of bandwidth for every two GPUs, so even businesses operating at the cluster level can communicate at twice the speed. HPE’s first optimized 4-GPU server, is a single AMD EPYC processor system which delivers better price-performance than ever for HPC. Also, with a refreshed 8-GPU offering supporting up to two AMD EPYC processors per server, enterprises can harness up to 16 PCIe GPUs, more than twice as many as HPE has supported in the past.

In addition, the HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus System offers extensive storage options, with up to 16 front-accessible storage devices, SAS/SATA solid-state drives, and up to six NVMe drives to access data faster while consuming less power. HPE has plans to roll out new solutions through H1 2021, which will feature a staggering 16 NVMe drives for almost 6X greater bandwidth. Now, HPE customers can harness the robust power, frequency, and processing capacity of accelerated computing to drastically reduce time-to-insight.

Selecting a Technology Partner

There are a growing number of choices in ways to increase HPC and AI/ML capabilities. Today’s systems are designed to be optimized for specific workflows – regardless of varying needs. To make full use of the available technology, users should look for a technology partner that offers complete solutions and services.

HPE has a strong track record of delivering top-performing systems for business and scientific computing and provides a comprehensive solution including:

  • A full software stack including a programming environment, systems management, and workflow management tools
  • Support services to avoid downtime, ensure availability, and maintain performance
  • Applications engineering help with deep industry expertise and support
  • Financial flexibility to deploy HPC and AI/ML processing where you need it and how you consume it.
  • Building solutions based on the best available technology like AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators for faster time to value.

As technology leaders in HPC, together HPE and AMD can deliver real-world expertise for the most demanding applications.

HPE has a long and rich history in providing leading-edge systems for the HPC market. Over the last few years, the company has made strategic acquisitions that allowed it to expand its offerings and have access to innovative technologies that have since been integrated into its product lines. Notable deals included the acquisitions of Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) and Cray Computing, both known for their capabilities in high-performance computing.

Additional factors to consider when evaluating solutions

When looking for an HPC solution for today’s most demanding workloads, raw processing power alone is not enough. Many other factors should be considered when evaluating a solution. And in fact, many of these additional factors that should go into an evaluation are areas where HPE excels. Some of these include:

HPE Pointnext Services: HPE Pointnext Services advises businesses on IT strategy to transform hybrid cloud environments, take advantage of AI, and innovate at the edge. IT experts design and build solutions with the latest software-defined technology and help businesses operate and optimize their environments across hybrid cloud and traditional IT. This offloads the tasks of running IT from internal staff, so IT can be consumed as a service. HPE Pointnext Services also fills the missing skills gap that many companies have when implementing new technologies. Pointnext services include:

  • Cloud services to bring agility and manageability to your technology environment.
  • Edge services to achieve better insights and automation at the edge.
  • Modernization services to transform your IT and data center with automation and container technologies.
  • Data-driven services help you streamline AI adoption and migrate to unified data platforms.

HPE Finance Services: HPE Finance Services offers helps accelerate the adoption of needed technology. There is IT financing for SMBs so they can get access to the technology they need to support their business. IT asset lifecycle solutions from HPE Financial Services help companies extract additional value from their existing IT investments or move to new technology more effectively. And IT investment solutions help companies get the technology they need with the budget they have today. The programs make it easy to structure expenses in the way that makes the most sense for a business.

Security and management: The HPE Silicon Root of Trust secures the Gen10 portfolio with firmware protection, malware detection, and firmware recovery down to the silicon. This unrivaled technology ensures that HPE servers will never boot with compromised firmware, making them “The World’s Most Secure Industry Standard Servers.” HPE iLO server management software enables customers to securely configure, monitor, and update HPE systems seamlessly from anywhere in the world, so customers can operate with confidence. AMD Infinity Guard adds layers of protection that help secure your data and mitigate risk.

HPE GreenLake: HPE GreenLake for HPC is a consumption-based payment model that aligns cash to actual usage. With HPE GreenLake, businesses can select from a wide range of pre-configured services, such as containers, VMs, storage, compute, data protection, or SAP HANA. The solution can scale with ease with capacity that is actively monitored, managed, and proactively deployed when needed. And since it relies on expertise from HPE’s IT Operations Centers, it frees up staff to work on other projects.

In conclusion

The new HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus systems accelerate performance to take on the most complex HPC and AI workloads. The purpose-built platform built on AMD EPYC processors provides unprecedented compute power with industry-leading CPUs, GPUs, fast interconnects, high-bandwidth fabric, and configurable topology.

Simply put, the HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 System with AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators deliver exceptional performance, faster insights, and advanced security to take your business to the next level. In addition, this platform is engineered to be resilient, so customers can operate with confidence, regardless of their HPC and AI requirements. This accelerated computing system is changing the game for customers around the world by offering:

  • High-density computing for data-intensive tasks
  • Rock-solid availability and reliability at the enterprise-level
  • Easy deployment and manageability
  • Flexibility to meet data center requirements
  • Optimized design for increased simplicity and faster time to value

HPC and AI innovation is revolutionizing business operations. Visit us online to learn how HPE and AMD can help you realize your goals.

Would you like to apply for our HPE Insiders for HPC client-only community? It is a dedicated invitation-only space to keep you informed, give you your seat at the table and have some fun along the way with your peers!!


[i] AMD EPYC has up to 64c/128t and Intel Scalable has up to 56c/112t, per processor. EPYC-10

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