Reference Guide

System Building Blocks
6 Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC Digital Manufacturing with AMD EPYC™ Processors—Altair Performance
A recommended base configuration for infrastructure servers is:
• Dell EMC PowerEdge R6515 server
• AMD EPYC 7302P processor
• 128GB of RAM (8 x 16GB 3200 MTps DIMMs)
• PERC H335 RAID controller
• 2 x 480GB Mixed-Use SATA SSD RAID 1
• Dell EMC iDRAC9 Enterprise
• 2 x 550W Power Supplies
• Mellanox ConnectX-6 InfiniBand
TM
HCA (optional)
The recommended base configuration for the infrastructure server is described as follows. The PowerEdge
R6515 server is suited for this role. Typical HPC clusters will only require a few infrastructure servers;
therefore, density is not a priority, but manageability is important. The AMD EPYC 7302P processor, with 16
cores per socket, is suitable for this role. If the infrastructure server will be used for CPU intensive tasks, such
as compiling software or processing data, then a more capable processor may be appropriate. 128GB of
RAM provided by eight 16GB DIMMs provides sufficient memory capacity, while also providing good memory
bandwidth. These servers are not expected to perform much I/O, but reliability is important, so two mixed-use
SATA SSDs in RAID1 configuration are recommended for the operating system. For small systems (four
nodes or less), an Ethernet network may provide sufficient application performance. For most other systems,
InfiniBand is likely to be the data interconnect of choice, which provides a high-throughput, low-latency fabric
for node-to-node communications or access to Dell EMC HPC Storage Ready Solutions.
2.2 Compute Building Blocks
Compute Building Blocks (CBB) provide the computational resources for most HPC systems for Digital
Manufacturing. These servers are used to run the various Altair HyperWorks simulations. The best
configuration for these servers depends on the specific mix of applications and types of simulations being
performed by each customer. Since the best configuration may be different for each customer, a table of
recommended options are provided that are appropriate for these servers. The configuration can be selected
based on the specific system and workload requirements of each customer. Relevant criteria to consider
when selecting a system configuration are discussed in the application performance chapters of this white
paper. The recommended configuration options for the Compute Building Block are provided in Table 1.