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10 Dell HPC System for Manufacturing—System Architecture and Application Performance
• 4 x 600 GB 10K SAS drives in RAID 0 (for local temporary storage)
• QLogic 10 GbE Network Daughter Card (NDC)
• Dell iDRAC8 Express
• 2 x 1100 W PSUs
• One NVIDIA GRID
®
K2
• EDR InfiniBand (optional)
The recommended configuration for the VDI server is described here. A PowerEdge R730 is required to
support the NVIDIA GRID K2 which is used to provide hardware accelerated 3D graphics. The Intel Xeon
E5-2680 v4 with 14 cores at 2.4 GHz (maximum all-core turbo of 2.9 GHz) is a cost effective processor for
VDI and provides uniformity with the infrastructure building block servers. VDI systems require a large
amount of memory in order to support multiple users, and therefore 32GB DIMMs are recommended. A 2
DIMM per channel configuration maximizes available memory bandwidth. 600 GB 10K drives provide
sufficient performance and capacity, and allow part commonality between infrastructure, VDI and EBB
servers. A 10 GbE NDC is recommended to provide sufficient network bandwidth for multiple
simultaneous users. The management capabilities provided by an iDRAC8 Express are sufficient for VDI.
InfiniBand is optional on the VDI system; however, an InfiniBand HCA is required to access an NSS or IEEL
storage solution.
2.6 Dell NSS-HA Storage
The Dell NFS Storage Solution (NSS) provides a tuned NFS storage option that can be used as primary
storage for user home directories and application data. The current version of NSS is NSS7.0-HA with
options of 240 TB or 480 TB raw disk space. NSS is an optional component and a cluster can be
configured without NSS.
NSS-HA is the high performance computing network file system (NFS) storage solution of Dell, optimized
for performance, availability, resilience, and data reliability. The best practices used to implement this
solution result in better throughput compared to non-optimized systems. A high availability (HA) setup,
with an active-passive pair of servers, provides a reliable and available storage service to the compute
nodes. The HA unit consists of a pair of Dell PowerEdge R730 servers. A Dell PowerVault MD3460 dense
storage enclosure provides 240 TB of storage for the file system with 60 x 4 TB, 7.2K near-line SAS drives.
This unit can be extended with a PowerVault MD3060e to provide an additional 240 TB of disk space for
the 480 TB solution. Each of the PowerVault arrays is configured with 6 virtual disks (VDs). Each VD
consists of 10 hard drives configured in RAID6 (8+2).
The NFS server nodes are directly attached to the dense storage enclosures by using 12 Gbps SAS
connections. NSS7.0-HA provides two network connectivity options for the compute cluster: EDR
InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The active and passive NFS servers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
7.2 with Red Hat’s Scalable File System (XFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite to implement the HA feature.