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6 Dell HPC System for Manufacturing—System Architecture and Application Performance
2 System Building Blocks
The Dell HPC System for Manufacturing is assembled by using preconfigured building blocks. The
available building blocks are infrastructure servers, storage, networking, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
(VDI), and application specific compute building blocks. These building blocks are preconfigured to
provide good performance for typical applications and workloads within the manufacturing domain. The
building block architecture allows for a custom HPC system for specific end-user requirements, while still
making use of standardized, domain-specific building blocks. This section describes the available building
blocks along with the rationale of the system configurations.
2.1 Infrastructure Servers
The infrastructure servers are used to administer the system and enable user access. They are not actively
involved in computation or storage, but they provide services that are critical to the overall HPC system.
Typically these servers are the master nodes and the login nodes.
For small sized clusters, a single physical server can provide all these functions. It can also be used for
storage, by using NFS, where it must be configured with additional disk drives or an external storage array.
One master node is mandatory and is required to deploy and manage the system. If high-availability (HA)
functionality is required, two master nodes are necessary. Login nodes are optional and one login server
per 30-100 users is recommended.
The recommended configuration for infrastructure servers is:
• Dell PowerEdge R630 server
• Dual Intel
®
Xeon
®
E5-2680 v4 processors
• 128 GB of memory, 8 x 16 GB 2400 MT/s DIMMs
• PERC H730 RAID controller
• 2 x 600 GB 10K SAS drives in RAID 1
• Dell iDRAC8 Enterprise
• 2 x 1100 W power supply units (PSUs)
• EDR InfiniBand™ (optional)
The recommended configuration for the infrastructure server is described here. The PowerEdge R630
server is suited for this role. A cluster will have only a small number of infrastructure servers; therefore,
density is not a concern, but manageability is more important. The Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 processor is a
mid-bin 120 W, 14c CPU which is sufficient for this role. 128 GB of memory by using 8x16 GB DIMMs
provides sufficient memory capacity, with minimal cost/GB, while also providing good memory
bandwidth. These servers are not expected to perform much I/O. Therefore, two drives are sufficient and
RAID 1 is selected to protect the OS on these servers. For small systems (four nodes or less), a Gigabit
Ethernet network may provide sufficient 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-node
communications, or access to a Dell NFS Storage Solution (NSS) or Dell Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre
(IEEL) storage solution.