Nuts and Volts - May/June 2018

HPC from Lenovo

You may associate Lenovo ( www.lenovo.com) with low-end computers in the Walmart electronics department. However, the company moved into the high-performance computing market last year with its ThinkSystem product line.

The machines — based on Intel’s “Skylake” Xeon Scalable Processor (Xeon SP) — span rack-and-blade units for several markets. The latest is the SD650, which is “more purpose-built for HPC, especially for those environments where cooling costs The server comes with your choice of either Platinum or Gold Xeon XP processors, and its dual-socket design means that you can get up to 56 cores per server if you opt for the 28-core chips. As of now, graphics processing units are not supported, but the company says that the use of high-end Xeon chips makes them unnecessary. Using the fastest Platinum chip — the Xeon 8180 — an SD650 server can deliver four teraflops of peak performance, which until recently was only possible with graphics coprocessors, Xeon Phi processors, or some other sort of accelerator.

Memory capacity is up to 768 GB using 12 DIMM slots. That’s nice, but the machine’s main claim to fame is its warm-water cooling system which provides direct cooling to the CPUs, memory modules, and storage drives. Inlet temperatures can be as high as 45°C, and in some cases 50°C (113°F and 122°F), which means little if any chilled water is needed. According to Lenovo, “With air cooling, a data center consumes about 60 percent of the server power to cool the servers, compared to 40 percent with chilled water, and less than 10 percent with warm water like the SD650. The potential savings for an HPC cluster that has a power consumption of 4 to 5 MW can be substantial over its typical four to five year operating life with € 100,000s in savings per year.” Pricing was not revealed, but you probably won’t be putting one on your Walmart credit card. ▲ EVENTS, ADVANCES, AND NEWS

COMPUTERS and NETWORKING

Pick a New Berry

If your wallet won’t allow you to enter the HPC world (or even Disney World), take a look at the latest bare-bones model from the Raspberry Pi Foundation ( www.raspberrypi.org). The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is based on a 1.4 GHz/64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, onboard dual-band gigabit 802.11 b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth, and an HDMI 1.3a port. It also has four USB 2.0 ports, camera and display interfaces, a VideoCore IV graphics core, and a microSD slot. The price remains an astonishing $35.

Of course, it doesn’t include anything in the way of peripherals, but if you ramp your order up to the $69.95 starter kit, you’ll also get a 16 GB microSD card preloaded with the Raspbian operating system, a case, a power supply, an Ethernet cable, and aluminum CPU and GPU heatsinks. How can you resist? ▲