Supercomputers are tremendous costly, however Hewlett Packard Enterprise has introduced plans to make supercomputing accessible for extra enterprises by providing scaled down, extra reasonably priced variations of its Cray supercomputers.
The brand new portfolio consists of HPE Cray EX and HPE Cray XD supercomputers, that are primarily based on the Frontier exascale supercomputer at Oak Ridge Nationwide Labs. These servers include the complete array of {hardware}, together with compute, accelerated compute, interconnect, storage, software program, and versatile energy and cooling choices.
The primary system is the HPE Cray EX2500, which has the identical structure because the HPE Cray EX4000 supercomputer utilized in constructing Frontier, but it surely’s 24% smaller to suit inside an enterprise information middle. The exceptional factor is that the discount got here within the cooling system and never by utilizing much less {hardware}, mentioned Gerald Kleyn, vp of HPC/MCS/Edge {Hardware} Methods and silicon engineering at HPE. The EX2500 makes use of the identical switches and blades because the EX4000 utilized in Frontier.
“HPC prospects have a specific finances that they are making an attempt to suit into, they usually’re making an attempt to get the utmost efficiency inside that finances. And so this lets us get into areas with budgetary constraints that we could not get into with the supercomputers earlier than,” Kleyn mentioned.
The EX2500 is water-cooled, not air cooled, and HPE built-in the coolant-distribution unit (CDU) into the server cupboard itself, quite than having a separate cupboard like on the EX4000 mannequin. It not solely saves house but additionally saves cash. Kleyn mentioned the HPE Cray EX2500 supercomputer prices a fraction of the value of the HPE Cray EX4000 supercomputer.
The following system is the HPE Cray XD2000, a 2U platform that goes in an ordinary 19 inch information middle rack and is descended from HPE’s Apollo 2000 line. This server is both air or liquid cooled, and the primary cause you’d use the XD2000 quite than EX2500 is you probably have the infrastructure in your information middle for water cooling. For the reason that EX2500 is simply water cooled, enterprises sticking to air cooling would use the XD2000.
HPE mentioned it would supply compute blades for the XD2000 and EX2500 with each Intel’s 4th-Gen Xeon Scalable (aka Sapphire Rapids) and AMD’s Epyc 4 Genoa CPUs.
The XD6500 is a 5U platform with as much as eight Nvidia H100 Hopper GPUs, making it much like Nvidia’s DGX servers. The XD6500 is for superior workloads together with modeling, simulation and AI. Just like the XD2000, it’s a rebranding of an outdated Apollo product.
With eight Hopper processors, it ought to come as no shock that the XD6500 is focused in direction of the AI market and machine studying developer setting to assist information scientists construct out these AI workloads.
Along with the {hardware}, the supercomputers include HPE Slingshot, a excessive velocity Ethernet interconnect, Cray Clusterstor E1000 to offer expanded storage with clever tiering, and HPE Cray Programming Setting, providing a totally built-in software program suite with compliers and developer instruments.
Kleyn mentioned the Cray servers are a step above the newly introduced ProLiant servers due to the liquid cooling. The liquid cooling permits for a denser server footprint, “which implies you do not have as many optical cables working throughout the info middle to sew all this collectively. So you may couple them extra tightly collectively and get larger efficiency at a decrease price level,” he mentioned.
Cray XD and EX servers with AMD Epyc processors can be found now, with Intel Xeon Scalable slowly coming to market as Intel ramps manufacturing. They’re obtainable for outright buy and thru the GreenLake consumption mannequin.
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