World’s fastest blade solution brings higher performance, better manageability and more flexibility to customers
The fastest blade system solution for high-performance computing unveiled by HP at the 2006 International Supercomputing Conference provides servers with high-performance interconnects for increasingly complex high-performance computing workloads. HPC customers also require increased processor and node support, more efficient energy usage, and increased cooling capabilities. The HP BladeSystem c-Class addresses these key concerns and delivers best-in-class performance with greater flexibility at a lower cost.
Blade server adoption in the HPC environment is continuing to grow because it offers customers various benefits. Blades are the ideal platform for clusters because of their use of industry standard technologies; simplified management; reduced interconnect and network complexity; high density and efficient power and cooling.
InfiniBand
The HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure features the world’s fastest midplane at 5 terabits per second of aggregate throughput, and the first midplane to support 4X DDR (Double Data Rate) InfiniBand®, the industry’s fastest blade server interconnect delivering up to 20 gigabits per second bandwidth in each direction. As the latest InfiniBand technology, 4X DDR doubles the peak bandwidth of the existing 4X SDR (Single Data Rate) standard, with a more than 50% improvement measured at the user level. It also lowers the latency by about 10 to 20%, which is very important to HPC applications.
Customer Benefits Include:
- Higher performance with 4X DDR -- Ample benchmarks showed that GigE does not scale beyond small number processors for many HPC applications, while InfiniBand scales much better and to a much larger processor count
- Better manageability with integrated switch module in the c-Class enclosure
- More flexibility -- Multiple HCAs and switches provide customers with various configurations to meet their bandwidth requirements for their HPC applications
Low CPU overhead is another benefit of InfiniBand. HPC applications will be able to take advantage of this by overlapping communication with computation. Mellanox, an HP partner and leader in business and technical computing interconnects, made a measurement that indicates less than 5% CPU is utilized for transport processing
Also, HP’s 4X DDR Mezzanine HCA (Host Channel Adapter) uses the memory-free technology from Mellanox for lower power consumption, an important requirement for blade servers. Performance testing by Mellanox and Ohio State University indicates there is virtually no performance degradation of using memory-free technology.
The next generation HP BladeSystem c-Class also offers the highest performance Itanium, Xeon and Opteron processors with the broadest choice of 2- 4-P nodes, integrated storage blades and multiple operating systems. The power and cooling is designed for dense clusters, and Thermal Logic technology, which dynamically adjusts power and cooling to meet energy budgets, is used for best energy efficiency. The extensive intelligent blade management infrastructure includes Virtual Connect architecture for simplest, most flexible connection and Insight Control for best savings, greatest control, and most flexibility.
The c-Class offerings are supported in HP’s Unified Cluster Portfolio, a comprehensive, modular package of hardware, software and services for high performance computing. The portfolio's HP Cluster Platform 3000BL and 4000BL will integrate the new HP BladeSystem c-Class into HPC-optimized configurations, with choice of factory-installed cluster software, enabling rapid and easy deployment.
BladeSystem partners
As members of HP’s BladeSystem Solution Builder program, Mellanox, and Voltaire, a leader in grid backbone solutions, collaborated with HP to produce this fastest InfiniBand interconnect solution for the BladeSystem c-Class. Mellanox’s 20Gb/s DDR (Double Data Rate) InfiniBand HCAs (Host Channel Adapter) and switch blades will provide the optimal performance interconnect for the new BladeSystem c-Class systems. Voltaire’s Double Data Rate (DDR) InfiniBand solutions will provide the high performance switching and management for the HP BladeSystem c-Class architecture.
The HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades will also support cluster management software available from open source, HP partners, and HP’s fully supported and highly scalable XC Cluster Software. HP will support Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, released by Microsoft earlier this month. With the addition of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 to HP’s Unified Cluster Portfolio, HP will offer customers strong choices of HP-UX 11i, Windows and Linux to meet their HPC operating environment requirements.
About HP
HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, 2006, HP revenue totaled $88.9 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.
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