ASUS servers in a supercomputer based on GPUs
Using ESC4000 / FDR G2 HPC servers, the project with 500 TFLOPS performance ranked second in the Green421,2 global list was realized. Experts select ASUS ESC4000 / FDR G2 HPC servers SANAM HPC cluster to support nationwide scientific research used by scientists at Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) in Germany and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) in Saudi Arabia to build.
By November 2012, SANAM was ranked second on the global Green500 list of supercomputers in terms of their energy efficiency, making it the second most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world. On the list of the largest supercomputers, the TOP500, the 52nd-place device has a total processing power of 421,2 TFLOPS. SANAM includes 210 ASUS ESC4000 / FDR G2 processing nodes, 420 AMD FirePro ™ S10000 modules with two graphics processing units (GPUs), and a 420 eight-core Intel® Xeon® E5-2650 processor, for a total of 38400 cores.
Experts have chosen the ESC4000 / FDR G2 to create the SANAM supercomputer, which can be deployed in areas such as oil industry, space exploration, bioinformatics research, weather forecasting, or simulation of chemical reactions and particle movements. Using the latest HPC technology, the device delivers incredible parallel processing performance and extremely low latency InfiniBand ™ FDR-based data transfer at speeds of up to 56 Gbps. Its design can be a great choice for computationally intensive applications that require detailed modeling, just as the full ASUS ESC product line is successfully used for financial, virtualization and high-end scientific applications. In November 500, the Green2012 list ranked SANAM in second place for its highly efficient 2,3 GFLOPS performance per watt (i.e., performing a 2,3 billion calculation per second at one watt of power consumption). In November, the unit was 52nd on the TOP500 list with a result of 421,2 TFLOPS, which it achieved at half the price of a system with similar power consumption using only CPUs. SANAM has the great advantage of the ESC4000 / FDR G2 hybrid processing architecture, which makes the most of the processing running in parallel on the CPU and GPU (i.e. the central processing unit and the graphics processing unit).
The ESC4000 / FDR G2 is a 2U high hybrid CPU / GPU supercomputer / HPC server. Its flexible design offers more freedom of choice as it also supports the use of Intel® Xeon Phi ™ processors as well as AMD and NVIDIA® graphics processors. The motherboard can accommodate two Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 processors at the same time, and the nine PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots make it highly expandable. Its cooling is solved by intelligent controllers that handle the CPU and GPU fans separately, and to make it easy to maintain, all eight 3,5 ez hard drive bays have been designed to reduce downtime, replaceable during operation. The ESC4000 / FDR G2 is powered by two 1620-watt 80 PLUS Platinum power supplies that help save energy with 94% efficiency.
