deskside supercomputing
problems that previously discouraged users. Tennert adds that there seems to be a market for this class of machine and notes that the rebirth of the CX1 as the Nexxus C series is getting high interest among his customers. A typical workstation has two or four sockets,
whereas the Nexxus C allows for 20 processors, 120 cores, 16 GPUs and almost 2TB of memory. Measuring 20.1 x 25.7 x 29.7 inches, it holds four trays with up to eight nodes. Te operating temperature is 10 to 30°C and the operating relative humidity is 8 to 90 per cent. Users can select from four modules, one being the NXG600 with as many as four Nvidia C2075s, each with 448 Cuda cores. It supports both Microsoſt Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS. Emphasising the unit’s intended use as a cluster, options include the Platform Cluster Manager and the Bright Cluster Manager middleware. Confident that there is indeed a market
for personal clusters, T-Platforms recently introduced its T-Mini P system, which is basically a cube on rollers. It resembles the CX1 in that it also has a front-panel touch LCD for basic chassis management and a system status applet for Windows; Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 is the primary OS and the vendor does not officially support Linux. Te chassis accepts one head node (either Xeon E5 2600 or Opteron 6x00) and either eight ‘skinny’ nodes or four ‘fat’ nodes, likewise with a Xeon or Opteron, the latter also being large enough to support Tesla GPUs from Nvidia. Note that this unit uses six redundant (N+1) cooling fans.
Liquid cooling for cooling and overclocking Removing heat from such loaded systems without creating any excess noise presents a true challenge. Manufacturers of ‘big iron’ have long used liquid cooling in large clusters and this technology is now working its way down to the desktop/deskside level. For instance, to address the issue of cooling, Ciara, headquartered in Montreal, has turned to another Canadian company, CoolIT Systems. Tat company states that liquid cooling has
recently become a requirement of high-end desktop processors with the launch of the Intel Core i7-3900 series. Tese processors do not ship with cooling solutions, but Intel offers the RTS2011LC liquid cooler, which can be purchased separately. According to CoolIT, this liquid-cooling solution, which was designed for the enthusiast/gaming market with features such as illumination, may not provide sufficient cooling for an engineering workstation or cluster. Tus, CoolIT sells the ECO II, which like most similar liquid cooling systems consists of two components. First is a header that fits
www.scientific-computing.com
on top of a CPU with a micro-channel fluid heat exchanger; a pump in the header sends heated fluid to the second major component, an aluminium radiator whose fin pitch and fluid path have been optimised to allow peak efficiency with both low and moderate fan speeds. Various radiator sizes are available ranging from 80 x 104 x 25mm to 274 x 120 x 27mm. Te datasheet specs list acoustic noise of 23 dBA. Tis liquid cooling does more than just
remove heat; because the CPUs run so much cooler, they can be overclocked to achieve enhanced performance. Ciara, for instance, uses this feature to allow what it refers to as ‘safe overclocking’ of CPUs for applications that require absolute processor speed performance, such as CAD and finite-element analysis. Tis cooling scheme is not only used in deskside clusters; the firm’s Kronos S900 pedestal workstation comes with the dual Intel Xeon X5690 processor, which is spec’d for operation at 3.46 GHz, but with the addition of liquid cooling runs at 4.4 GHz. Another supplier of sealed liquid cooling
systems is Asetek, which this summer announced it has shipped its 1,000,000th sealed liquid cooler – this could be due to the fact that the company also provides the technology for Intel’s RTS2011LC cooler, which has proven very popular in gaming PCs. Te system likewise consists of a cold-plate unit for the CPU, including an integrated pump and reservoir, a heat exchanger (radiator) and connecting tubes to transport the liquid. Tis liquid cooling, says the developer, delivers what is equivalent to three metric tons of liquid per minute for every square metre of die area. An interesting Asetek
product is the 760GC Combo Liquid Cooler, which provides cooling heads for two CPUs: for one Nvidia GTX 570 or 580 GPU and one popular AMD or Intel CPU. Tis firm is also active in the workstation market, supplying liquid cooling for HP’s Z400 and Z800 workstations as well as several Tier two workstation suppliers. Sealed liquid cooling from
Asetek is also the choice for Boston with its Venom 2300- 7T workstation, which comes with dual eight-core Xeon
The Venom 2300-7T from Boston is a high-end personal workstation that uses sealed-liquid cooling to remove heat quietly
E5-2600 processors alongside the Quadro 4000 and Tesla C2075 cards, all in a small midi-tower chassis. It also features 128GB of solid-state memory for the OS (optionally expandable to 400GB of solid state memory) and two 2TB (optionally 4TB) of RAID1 disk storage. Another workstation company relying
Further information
Asetek
www.asetek.com
Boston
www.boston.co.uk
Boxx Technologies
www.boxxtech.com
Ciara Technologies
www.ciara-tech.com
CoolIT Systems
www.coolitsystems.com
Cray
www.cray.com
Intel
www.intel.co.uk
Nvidia
www.nvidia.co.uk
SGI
www.sgi.com
T-Platforms
www.t-platforms.com
Transtec
www.transtec.co.uk
on cooling systems from Asetek is Boxx Technologies. Its Model 4050 Xtreme, for instance, uses that method to overclock the Intel Core i7 processor at 4.5 GHz and features up to two Nvidia Quadro, GeForce or Tesla as well as ATI graphics cards. Because it supports both
Nvidia’s graphics GPUs and general-purpose GPUs, Boxx is among the companies presently certified in Nvidia’s Maximus program; other certified companies include Dell, Lenovo, HP and Fujitsu. Maximus technology combines the visualisation and interactive design capability of Quadro GPUs and the high-performance computing power of Tesla GPUs into a single workstation. Tesla processors automatically perform the heavy liſting of engineering simulation computations or photorealistic rendering, which frees up CPU resources for the work they are best suited for – I/O, running the OS and multi- tasking – and also allows the Quadro to be dedicated to powering interactive graphics.
AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2012 17
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