White Papers

System Building Blocks
6 Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing— Altair Performance
A recommended base configuration for infrastructure servers is:
• Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 server
• Dual Intel® Xeon® Bronze 3106 processors
• 192 GB of RAM (12 x 16GB 2667 MTps DIMMs)
• PERC H330 RAID controller
• 2 x 480GB Mixed-Use SATA SSD RAID 1
• Dell EMC iDRAC9 Enterprise
• 2 x 750 W power supply units (PSUs)
• Mellanox EDR InfiniBand
TM
(optional)
The recommended base configuration for the infrastructure server is described as follows. The PowerEdge
R640 server is suited for this role. Typical HPC clusters will only use a few infrastructure servers; therefore,
density is not a priority, but manageability is important. The Intel Xeon Bronze 3106 processor, with 8 cores
per socket, is a basic recommendation 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.
192 GB of memory provided by twelve 16 GB DIMMs provides sufficient memory capacity, with minimal cost
per GB, while also providing good memory bandwidth. These servers are not expected to perform much I/O,
so a single mixed-use SATA SSD should be sufficient for the operating system. For small systems (four
nodes or less), an Ethernet network may provide sufficient application performance. For most other systems,
EDR 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 a Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC NFS Storage
solution or a Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Lustre Storage solution.
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 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 specific configuration can then be selected based on
the specific system and workload requirements of each customer. Relevant criteria to consider when making
these selections 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.