Category Archives: HPC

Workload Acceleration Options for Blade Servers

I recently was asked what the demand for NVMe drives was, so I pinged my peers to see where they are seeing the adoption of NVMe (in rack or blade servers forms) and got a pretty interesting response.  This got me wondering what the options were for NVMe, as well as other acceleration technologies, in the blade server world.  Here is what I found.

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A Look at the Dark Side of the Force

When I go to San Francisco, I head over to the west side of town to peer through the closed gates of the hidden campus of Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) dreaming of catching a glimpse of the magic.  Recently Arik Hesseldahl, from All Things Digital, accomplished my dream and had a peek behind the curtains of what makes ILM run.  Arik interviewed ILM’s CIO, Kevin Clark and then toured the ILM data center.  Continue reading

(UPDATED) How IBM Can Provide 1,800 Processing Cores on a Single Blade Server

UPDATED 11-16-2010

IBM BladeCenter GPU Expansion Blade with HS22IBM recently announced a new addition to their BladeCenter family – the IBM BladeCenter GPU Expansion blade.  This new offering provides a single HS22 with the capability of hosting up to 4 x NVIDIA Tesla M2070 or Tesla M2070Q GPUs each running 448 processing cores each.  Doing the math, this equals the possibility of having 4,928 processing cores in a single 9u IBM BladeCenter H chassis.  That means you could have 19,712 processing cores PER RACK.  With such astonishing numbers, let’s take a deeper look at the IBM BladeCenter GPU Expansion blade.  

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