Cluster Connection » Appro Hypergreen

Blade Systems Make Perfect HPC Cluster Building Block Solution

Maria McLaughlin — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:46:29 +0000

In some sense, blades have always used a more green design. In terms of energy efficiency, the advantage of blades is the ability to use shared power and cooling. The Appro GreenBlade as an example takes full advantage of these features. Each blade contains a dual socket Nehalem motherboard with 8 cores, up to 48 GB of DDR3 1333MHz memory, and an optional 1TB of internal storage. Ten blades fit in 5U chassis for a total of 80 cores, 480 GB of memory, and 10 TB of storage.
By adopting an improved green design, users can expect a 20% overall reduction in power use over previous 1U solutions. Coupled with the power saving capability of the new Intel® micro-architecture, the Appro GreenBlade offers outstanding compute/power efficiency. Power savings are derived from the shared redundant cooling fans and power supplies. The power supplies are high-efficiency (90%+) and configured in a N+1 redundant fashion. Another advantage of bladed systems is the enhanced manageability that 1U solutions cannot offer. Each subrack chassis has a shelf manager that provides power control and staged power-up of all blades. Blades, fans and power supplies can be monitored remotely using standard IPMI/BMC tools.
The system comes in a 5U form factor and holds up to 10 blade nodes in one chassis offering up to 80 processing cores in a computing solution box that can scale as the need for compute capacity expands. By sharing power and cooling in one package, GreenBlade helps HPC users save up-front costs and reduce monthly energy and air-conditioning bills. The Appro GreenBlade system also adds redundancy to each server to prevent unplanned downtime, making it easier to allocate a single spare to protect many servers at once. With its open and modular architecture, it provides the essential elements for building, deploying, maintaining, and upgrading clusters for greater customer flexibility and choice.
In addition, the initial entry price point of the Appro GreenBlade is at price parity with 1U rack-mounted servers, making the crossover point favorable for the GreenBlade system and a better fit for HPC midmarket deployments.
Density and Reliability
A typical 1U solution can hold one or two motherboards. With a single motherboard solution, only 40 cores can be placed in the same 5U space occupied by the Appro GreenBlade System thus requiring additional rack space (and power) to achieve the same core parity. If a dual motherboard solution is used, then the same density can be achieved but at the cost of sharing a single non-redundant power supply for two motherboards. The loss of a power supply or the need to service one of the motherboards requires both motherboards to be out of service. Because the GreenBlades share redundant power supplies, each blade is hot-swappable and can be serviced without affecting any other blade. Eight sub-rack chassis can be housed in a standard 42 rack for a total of 640 cores.

The Intel® Cluster Ready Program enables faster, easier deployment of higher performance HPC clusters based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series. Intel Cluster Ready makes it simpler to choose, deploy and manage HPC clusters, and ensures application and system interoperability. In doing so, it enables companies to rapidly capitalize on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and use it to solve bigger problems, expedite total application performance, and reduce TCO. Bottom line: simpler, more powerful and more cost-effective high performance computing. The Intel Cluster Ready certification gives customers another reason to deploy the Appro GreenBlade solution by offering confidence that the cluster architecture and software are certified to work together. It also gives Independent Software Vendors (ISV) the ability to run their software in this certified cluster platform providing a fast and cost-effective implementation for industry-specific solutions.
Not all blades are created equal. In the HPC sector, blades need to be both green and provide high performance. The Appro GreenBlade System provides an extremely flexible and manageable way to create high-density computing. It is designed to scale, with little effort or re-configuration.
The Appro cluster solution based on the GreenBlade building block offers a variety of interconnect options to include only standard 1U Ethernet or 1U Infiniband (IB) switches. This is accomplished by pre-allocating space in each rack cabinet for two standard 24-port Infiniband or Ethernet switches. This offers flexibility for customers who may choose to deploy either an Ethernet or IB-based HPC cluster. Appro also offers variations in the Infiniband interconnect with ConnectX DDR single IB, DDR dual IB or QDR single IB configurations. The Appro GreenBlade is unique in this category; each blade can provide one or two QDR InfiniBand ports on the motherboard and thus do not require any additional PCIe HCAs to be added to the blade. All these options provide excellent network bandwidth and low latency at an affordable price point to many HPC workloads that require higher performance for their applications.
In addition, the Appro GreenBlade offers standards-based Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) with a choice of Appro’s remote server management or open source cluster management software solutions.
Long considered to be primarily useful only for HPC-scale deployments, blades are beginning to make inroads into the midsize HPC segment. With the introduction of blade products designed specifically for the needs of this market, such as the Appro GreenBlade system, midsize HPC customers are more likely to turn to blades for their day-to-day server infrastructure needs. The Appro GreenBlade is suited for small to midsize departmental and workgroup high performance computing data centers looking for flexibility of system configuration and network connectivity. This addresses the need for performance, reliability, floor space, power and cooling limitations, storage and remote management options at an affordable price. In addition, the Appro GreenBlade is ideal for HPC applications that require high bandwidth and low latency access to system memory, clustering, and Storage Area Networks (SAN).

Appro Delivers HyperGreen Cluster Solution to Support Rice University Computational Research Projects

Maria McLaughlin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:03:53 +0000

Appro, a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, today announced the award of a mid-sized Appro HyperGreen(TM) Intel(R) Cluster Ready certified solution for Rice University's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology in Houston. Located in the world's energy capital, Rice is a leader in the application of high-performance computing (HPC) for the oil and gas industry, and the university also boasts cutting-edge computational research in disciplines as diverse as biomedicine, energy, the environment, nanotechnology and materials science.

Rice University needed a modern, energy-efficient, high performance cluster capable to provide both high memory bandwidth and a fast interconnection network with full bisection bandwidth critical for their diverse tightly-coupled data-intensive parallel applications.

Rice's Appro HyperGreen Cluster solution will be shipped and installed this spring. The entire system consists of two fully integrated high-performance computing clusters based on the latest Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) 5500 series processors. It will contain 94 nodes with 752 processing cores using InfiniBand switches and Mellanox dual-port DDR InfiniBand HCAs. The system will be pre-configured with Appro BladeDome remote server management software designed to provide simplified administration along with cluster installation services and support.

"We are proud to provide Rice University with our Appro HyperGreen Cluster Solution for science computational research," said Daniel Kim, president and CEO of Appro. "Today, end-users can get a full range of high-performance computing taking advantage of Appro's mid-range innovative cluster solution packaged with the latest green technologies."

"Appro HyperGreen Cluster offers a dense, modular and Intel Cluster Ready certified solution that simplifies and accelerates HPC cluster deployment," said Richard Dracott, general manager of high-performance computing at Intel Corporation. "For this award, the Appro HyperGreen Cluster takes full advantage of Intel's QuickPath Technologies by providing Rice University researchers the expanded memory capacity and improved system I/O memory they need to continue producing world-class results allowing the Kennedy Institute to support a growing portfolio of computational science and engineering research."

Appro Unveils High-Density HyperGreen™ Cluster Solution

Maria McLaughlin — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:18:00 +0000

[Excerpt] Appro Unveils High-Density HyperGreen™ Cluster Solution to boost Power Efficiency and Performance in the Datacenter. Appro, a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, announced today the launch of the new Appro HyperGreen Cluster Solution and the support of the new Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processors 5500 series across all product lines.

Click here to download "Appro Hypergreen Press Release"

Appro HyperGreen Cluster is Intel Cluster Ready Certified

Maria McLaughlin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:52:16 +0000

The Appro HyperGreen Clusters based on the GreenBlade System is simply a smarter way to build cluster solutions providing the capacity computing that HPC applications require while offering better value compared to traditional rack mounted servers. Each GreenBlade system represents the evolution of traditional turnkey rack mounted server clusters. It consolidates server, storage, network, power and simplified management capabilities into one building block solution making it easy to test, configure, integrate and deploy.

In addition, the Appro HyperGreen Clusters is now Intel Cluster Ready certified simplifying the cluster integration and testing for deployment. Simplification, confidence, productivity, and quality are benefits that you get with an Intel Cluster Ready certified solution. The Intel Cluster Checker, an automated and systematic method to ensure the system is operating as expected at all times is shipped with each Appro HyperGreen Solution. Appro quality team verifies each Intel Cluster Ready solution functions at expected levels and provides the standard interface that enables running registered applications. This provides the ability for Independent Software Vendors (ISV) to run their registered Intel Cluster Ready applications in pre-tested and certified cluster architecture for easy interoperability and deployment.

Learn more about Appro's current GreenBlade System