Server Roundup: NVIDIA, HP, Cirrascale, Emerson

Here’s our review of some of today’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

NVIDIA GPU's accelerate HP Servers.  NVIDIA (NVDA) today announced that its NVIDIA Tesla GPUs will be included in HP ProLiant Generation 8 servers, delivering new levels of computational performance for scientific applications at world-class power efficiency. The HP ProLiant SL250 Gen8 CPU-GPU hybrid servers combine NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs with new Intel Xeon E5-2600 series CPUs based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. A peak performance of 4.6 teraflops can be reached by combining four CPUs and six GPUs in a 2U server configuration with two side-by-side HP ProLiant SL250 Gen8 servers. "The HPC industry is rapidly embracing hybrid computing architectures based on their superior performance and energy efficiency," said Sumit Gupta, director of Tesla GPU computing at NVIDIA. "Higher-performance Sandy Bridge CPUs unleash the power of NVIDIA GPUs to an even greater degree, enabling them to maximize acceleration for a range of commercial and scientific HPC applications, include AMBER, GROMACS, LAMMPS, Simulia Abaqus, seismic processing, and others."

Cirrascale servers feature Intel Xeon E5 processors.  Cirrascale  announced five new products for its BladeRack 2 platforms that support the Intel next-generation Xeon E5 Series server processors and C600 series chipset. The new VB1415 and VB1416 compute blades both integrate dual Xeon E5-2600 processors with up to 512GB DDR3 RDIMM in 16 DIMM slots, with 10GBaseT available on the VB1416. New single socket blades were announced with Xeon E5-1600 processors in the VB1420 and VB1421. “With energy representing the highest cost of operating a data center, anything data center operators can do to reduce power consumption while increasing performance and adding capacity adds significant value to their business,” said David Cowan, vice president of sales at Cirrascale. “New equipment based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 Series can replace an inefficient and aging installed-base, enabling higher utilization through virtualization and high performance computing and storage networks for public and private cloud deployments. Combining Intel’s latest processor platforms with Cirrascale’s Vertical Cooling Technology for next generation scale-out infrastructure will enable those operators to optimize data center total value of ownership.”

Emerson launches ATCA blade for Telecom.  Emerson Network Power (EMR) introduced a high-performance server blade that extends the processing, memory and I/O capabilities available to designers of AdvancedTCA (ATCA) based telecom servers, supporting the most demanding control plane applications. The ATCA-7370 uses the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family in a blade design which optimizes the flow of data between processors, memory devices, the backplane and rear transition modules (RTMs). Dual 10G Ethernet ATCA fabric interfaces using the Intel 82599 (formerly Niantic) network interface controller provide in-shelf data fabric connectivity, while an additional 36 lanes of PCIe Gen 3 can carry a huge traffic flow of up to 288Gbps on to and off the board via the rear transition area. The ATCA-7370 is expected to be widely adopted as a control plane blade by telecom equipment manufacturers developing systems for wireless and wireline networks.  “The reduced latency, lower power requirements and improved performance of the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family are ideal for ATCA server platforms and enable telecom equipment manufacturers to deliver the performance and capacity required for next generation infrastructure,” said Steve Price, marketing director at Intel Communications Infrastructure Division.