White Papers

Dell HPC General Computing – Configuration and Supported Architecture with Dell PowerEdge 13th Generation Servers
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Introduction
High Performance Computing (HPC) Clustering is the concept of building cost-effective, computation
intensive and performance optimized solutions built from commodity servers, storage, operating system,
middleware libraries and high bandwidth low latency interconnects. It aims to provide intense computing
power that can help perform data calculations and operations rapidly and scale effective with increasing
number of nodes. From software perspective the design includes a hierarchical integrated architecture
comprising of cluster configuration with middleware libraries, drivers tools that can be deployed,
provisioned, monitored and managed on large number of nodes.
This white paper provides information on the latest Dell HPC General Research Computing Solution based
on the Dell 13
th
Generation servers. The solution supports new generation Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 based
PowerEdge servers targeted to provide optimal performance and dense compute power.
Overview
This release includes support for the Bright Cluster Manager 7.1 with RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.6 errata
kernel (2.6.32-504.16.2.el6.x86_64) on the following Dell Haswell based servers. The release includes
support for updated Dell system management tools and utilities, network drivers and scripts, third party
components and integration with Dell BIOS API.
Table 1. Supported Server Configurations
Servers:
Interconnect support
Dell PowerEdge Rack series:
R730, R730XD,R630, R430, R930
PowerConnect 2800
Ethernet Force10 S , MXL and Z
series
Mellanox InfiniBand FDR/QDR
Dell PowerEdge M series:
M630, M830
Dell PowerEdge C series:
C6320, C4130
Dell PowerEdge FC series
FC830, FC630, FC430
Dell PowerEdge VRTX series:
M630
Reference Design and Targeted Platforms for various HPC needs
The supported servers in the above configuration cater to various general HPC compute needs. These are
applicable based on the customer needs and application characteristics. For example some of the server
selections are based on the infrastructure of the data center, power cooling, compute density, memory,
network communication and I/O characteristics of the code.
Table 2. Characteristics of Servers in HPC Configuration
PowerEdge Servers
Number of Cores
(Assumption is made
by keeping Intel Xeon
E5-2695 v3 @ 2.3GHz -
14C as baseline)
Number of cores in
1U/Rack
Total
Memory/DIMM
Slots
Support for
GPGPU/Accelarator
I/O HD
R730
28 14 24 YES 8x3.5"/16x2.5"
R730XD
28 14 24 NO 16x3.5"/26x2.5"
R630
28 28 24 NO 10x3.5"/24x1.8"
R430
28 28 12 NO 4x3.5"/10x2.5"
C6320
28 56 16 No 6x2.5"
C4130
28 28 16 YES 4x2.5"
FC630
28 56 24 NO 2x2.5"
FC430
28 112 8 NO 2x18"
M630 (in M1000e)
28 ~45 24 NO 2x2.5"SSD
GPU/Accelarator Nodes High Density Large Memory Large I/O Capacity