Enablement For Hpc In Proliant Servers; High I/O Bandwidth; High-Speed Interconnects - HP ProLiant DL360p Introduction Manual

Enablement for HPC in ProLiant servers

HP ProLiant servers designed for HPC include the following key design features:

High I/O bandwidth

High-speed interconnects

Highly efficient power and cooling
Integrated management using the HP Cluster Management Utility
High I/O bandwidth
GPGPU-based accelerators use on-board memory to store and process data sets. But most high-end
applications still require moving large data and result sets between system memory and the
accelerator. This demands a great deal of I/O bandwidth. To accommodate accelerators, ProLiant
servers have both dedicated and shared x16 PCIe 2.0 slots (varies by server). The x16 PCIe slots
have a data transfer rate of up to 16 GB/s (8 GB/s in each direction).
HP offers servers in a variety of form factors, with different numbers of CPUs, and a mixture of x16
PCIe Gen 2.0 slots. You can order some ProLiant DL servers with x16 PCIe 2.0 slots for full-length, full-
height or half-length, full height cards. Option kits are also available. Select ProLiant DL servers
accommodate 2-slot accelerator cards. Refer to the specific server's QuickSpecs for details on the
options available.
The SL390s G7 has enhanced expansion slot capabilities for HPC environments. It has three different
half-width server trays—1U, 2U, and 4U—with different slot support to serve multiple customer needs
(Table 4).
Table 4. ProLiant SL390s server trays
Standard slot
Internal slots
High-speed interconnects
A high-speed interconnect between GPGPU-equipped servers is critical for communication in HPC
cluster environments. Interconnect choices include 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) or InfiniBand™
(Quad Data Rate or Double Data Rate). If a server does not have integrated InfiniBand or 10GbE
connectivity, you must install an adaptor card for it. This is expensive and time-consuming in cluster
environments containing hundreds or thousands of servers.
The ProLiant SL390s server is purpose-built to provide a scalable infrastructure for HPC. Each ProLiant
SL390s G7 server includes integrated InfiniBand and 10GbE capabilities through a LAN on
Motherboard (LOM), which is more cost-effective than buying adaptor cards. The LOM lets you
immediately connect the server to any InfiniBand or Ethernet switch.
An example of a highly scalable server cluster of SL390s servers is the Tsubame 2.0 system at the
Tokyo Institute of Technology. HP, NEC, and Tokyo Tech, with technology partners NVIDIA,
Mellanox/Voltaire, Intel and DDN, designed Tsubame 2.0 to support diverse research workloads
such as weather, informatics, protein modeling, and more. It consists of 1,408 SL390s G7 servers,
1U half-width 2U half-width
(1) low-profile x8
(1) low-profile x16
PCIe 2.0
PCIe 2.0
(3) x16 PCIe 2.0 for
–
internal 2-slot GPU
(up to 225 W each)
4U half-width
(1) low-profile x8
PCIe 2.0
(8) x16 PCIe 2.0 for
internal 2-slot GPU
(up to 225 W each)
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