Acceleration Application Areas; Support For Visualization And Acceleration Products In Proliant Servers; I/O Bandwidth And Mechanical Support; Power And Cooling Support - HP 234664-002 - ProLiant - ML330T02 Technology Brief

Acceleration application areas

Acceleration applications exist in almost any endeavor that requires large-scale computationally
intensive problem solving. There are off-the-shelf applications available, although a significant
percentage of Acceleration applications are developed in-house by customers addressing very
specific needs. The following list indicates some of the typical acceleration applications areas.
 Scientific research
– Computational chemistry and biology
– Genetic research
 Engineering
– Engineering analysis
– Signal processing
– Seismic processing
– Video transcoding
 Business and financial
– Business Intelligence
– Database analytics
– Financial analysis
– Risk management
Support for visualization and acceleration products in
ProLiant servers
Visualization and Acceleration products place greater demands on system resources than most other
hardware add-ins. HP Engineering has invested extensive time and effort to ensure that the HP
ProLiant server platforms provide the best support possible for these products and for the applications
that use them.

I/O bandwidth and mechanical support

Almost all high-end visualization and acceleration applications involve the manipulation of massive
data and results sets. Although most GPU-based accelerators use onboard memory to contain and
process data sets, most high-end applications require the movement of large data and result sets
between system memory and the accelerator board. Accomplishing this quickly and efficiently
requires a great deal of I/O bandwidth. In order to provide the best support for accelerator products,
HP has incorporated true x16 PCI Express slots into many of its ProLiant servers. On servers using the
new 5 Gb/s per-lane signaling rate of PCIe 2.0, these x16 slots are capable of providing 8 GB/s of
send and receive bandwidth, for a total bandwidth of up to 16 GB/s.
Additionally, many of the x16 slots incorporated into ProLiant servers support full length, full height
PCIe cards, which is a requirement for most accelerator cards. Many of the more powerful accelerator
cards occupy the space of two physical slots. Although these cards are not supported on the smaller
2U servers, they are supported on some of the larger servers.

Power and cooling support

As high-performance compute engines, accelerator cards can use significantly more power than most
other PCIe cards. This isn't surprising, considering that a typical graphic processor by itself can
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