HP Introduces HPC System With Water Cooling
The American company HP has announced its first series of supercomputers in Las Vegas. The Apollo series aims to make hpc performance available to businesses; traditionally, it is mainly research institutes that use supercomputers.
The first supercomputers from HP’s factories have already been delivered, for testing purposes at Intel and as a research platform at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Intel uses the Apollo 6000 series to simulate its processor designs, while an Apollo 8000 system serves at the NREL. The Apollo 6000 series has 160 blade servers per rack, compared to 144 in the Apollo 8000 series. Despite this, the Apollo 8000 series is the more powerful – and most expensive – of the two.
According to HP, the Apollo 8000 series will be priced at several million dollars, bringing in thousands of petaflops of computing power. The Apollo 6000 series, with 80 server modules on board, would ‘only’ cost about $150,000.
The Apollo 6000 is constructed from 5U high trays containing a maximum of ten trays or blades. Each tray contains two nodes, with each tray built from an HP ProLiant XL220a Gen8 v2 Server. Each node in the tray is built from a single Xeon E3-1200 v3 processor with four cores up to 3.7GHz and up to 32GB of memory. Storage consists of two 2.5″ drives. Power is controlled by a separate 1.5U unit with up to six 2650W or 2400W power supplies.
The Apollo 8000 series is a water-cooled system that is configured per rack with 144 nodes. The servers are built in two in a tray and consist of HP ProLiant XL730f servers, with two processors per node. Each server has up to 256GB of memory, a 480GB SSD, and InfiniBand and Gigabit interconnects. The Xeons are from the E5-2600 v2 series, with maximum clock speeds of up to 3GHz and ten cores.
The water cooling consists of a vacuum system where the servers have a completely closed heatpipe system, so that hot swaps are possible without the risk of water damage. The cooling water can be used to heat the building with the residual heat; at the NREL it can also be used to keep the sidewalk free of ice in winter. The cooling would be much more economical than traditional air cooling via air conditioning. The Apollo series is available immediately.