IBM equips Linux server with Power8 chips with Nvidia NVLink

IBM has expanded its Power LC line of systems to include three servers. One has IBM’s Power8 processors with NVLink interconnects, for connection to Tesla P100 accelerators. The servers are intended for deep learning and artificial intelligence, among other things.

The three new systems are the Power System S822LC for High Performance Computing, the Power System S822LC for Big Data, and the System S821LC. The most powerful of the bunch is the Power System S822LC for High Performance Computing. IBM provides it with two Power8 chips: two decacores at 2.86GHz or a duo octacores at 3.25GHz.

The processors are combined with up to four Nvidia Tesla P100 accelerators with Pascal GPUs, which are incorporated into the systems in an smx2 form factor. The processors communicate with the accelerators via Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect, allowing workloads with a bandwidth of 80GB/s to be shared. The P100 boards are also interconnected with NVLink to share parallel computing back and forth.

The Tesla cards can quickly access the system memory through the NVLink and also have 16GB of HBM2 memory, which offers a bandwidth of 720GB/s. The Power8 chips have a 115GB/s line to the DDR4 and the systems support 500GB of RAM per socket.

The Power System S822LC for Big Data does not have NVLink and can be equipped with two Nvidia K80 video cards, in combination with two Power8 processors and up to 1TB memory. The regular S822LC system has to do with a maximum of 512GB DDR4 and a single Tesla K80. IBM equips all Power LC servers with Ubuntu 16.04 and focuses the systems on use for hpc analytics, big data, deep learning and artificial intelligence.