White Papers

8 Dell HPC System for Manufacturing—System Architecture and Application Performance
2.3 Implicit Building Blocks
Implicit Building Block (IBB) servers are typically used for implicit FEA solvers such as Abaqus/Standard,
Altair OptiStruct
®
, ANSYS Mechanical™, MSC™ Nastran™, and NX
®
Nastran. These applications typically
have large memory requirements and do not scale to as many cores as the EBB applications. They also
often have a large drive I/O component.
The recommended configuration for IBBs is:
• Dell PowerEdge R630 server
• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2667 v4 processors
• 512 GB of memory, 16 x 32 GB 2400 MT/s DIMMs
• PERC H730 RAID controller
• 8 x 300 GB 15K SAS drives in RAID 0
• Dell iDRAC8 Express
• 2 x 1100 W PSUs
• EDR InfiniBand (optional)
The recommended configuration for the IBB servers is described here. Typically, a smaller percentage of
the system will be comprised of IBB servers. Because of the memory and disk drive requirements
explained here, a 1U PowerEdge R630 server is a good choice. A dense PowerEdge C6320 is not needed,
particularly when a cluster may have fewer than 4 IBB servers to fill a C6300 chassis. The Intel Xeon E5-
2667 v4 processor is an eight-core CPU running at 3.2 GHz with a max all-core turbo frequency of 3.5
GHz. The E5-2667 v2 was a very popular choice for IBBs in the Ivy Bridge time frame and the v4 Broadwell
version of this SKU addresses many of the deficiencies of the v3 Haswell version. 16 cores in the server is
sufficient for IBB workloads that do not scale to many cores and the 3.5 GHz maximum all-core turbo
frequency is one of the fastest available for Broadwell processors. The E5-2667 v4 provides sufficient
memory bandwidth per core (117 GBps per CPU). 32 GB DIMMs are used to provide the larger memory
capacities needed for these applications in a 2 DIMM per channel configuration to maximize memory
bandwidth. IBB applications have large disk drive I/O requirements and eight 15K SAS disk drives in RAID 0
are used to provide fast local I/O. The compute nodes do not require extensive OOB management
capabilities and therefore an iDRAC8 Express is recommended.
InfiniBand is not typically necessary for IBBs because most uses cases require only running applications on
a single IBB; however, an InfiniBand HCA can be added to enable multi-server analysis or access to an NSS
or IEEL storage solution.
2.4 Implicit GPGPU Building Blocks
Some IBB-relevant applications are GPU enabled. Therefore, to support customers using GPU accelerated
applications, a GPU version of the IBB is available. Similar to IBB servers, Implicit GPGPU Building Blocks
(IGPGPUBB) are typically used for implicit FEA solvers such as Abaqus/Standard, Altair OptiStruct, ANSYS
Mechanical, MSC Nastran, and NX Nastran. The IGPGPUBB servers have similar requirements to IBBs with
the addition of GPUs. IGPGPUBB’s may also be appropriate when a general purpose compute
infrastructure is desired to support both GPU accelerated and non-GPU accelerated workloads.