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9 Dell HPC System for Manufacturing—System Architecture and Application Performance
The recommended configuration for IGPGPUBBs is:
• Dell PowerEdge R730 server
• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 processors
• 256 GB of memory, 16 x 16 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
• One NVIDIA
®
Tesla
®
K80
• EDR InfiniBand (optional)
The recommended configuration for the IGPGPUBB servers is described here. A Dell PowerEdge R730
server is required to support the NVIDIA Tesla K80. Relevant GPU-enabled applications typically do not
scale beyond two GPUs. Therefore, one K80 is sufficient. The Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 processor is a 14-
core CPU running at 2.4 GHz with a maximum all-core turbo frequency of 2.9 GHz. Because the GPU is
providing significant computing power for the IGPGPUBB, a high-end CPU is not required. The E5-2680
v4 is a cost effective, mid-bin processor, which is sufficient for this server.
The IBB used 32 GB DIMMs, but for the IGPGPUBB, 16 GB DIMMs are sufficient for GPU-optimized
workloads. 16 GB DIMMs in a 2 DIMM per channel configuration provides balanced memory capacity (256
GB) and memory bandwidth. Eight 15K SAS disk drives in RAID 0 are used to support the large disk drive
I/O requirements. Compute nodes do not require extensive OOB management capabilities and therefore
an iDRAC8 Express is recommended.
InfiniBand is not typically necessary for IGPGPUBBs because most uses cases require only running
applications on a single server; however, an InfiniBand HCA can be added to enable multi-server analysis
or access to an NSS or IEEL storage solution.
2.5 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Servers
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) servers provide remote desktop services that are co-located with the
compute resources. This allows for centralized management of visualization resources and reduces the
movement of data out of the datacenter. Users can be located in the same building as the datacenter or
anywhere with network access. The goal is to provide the user with a visual and interactive experience as if
they were working on a local workstation, while providing direct access to the resources of the HPC
system. If VDI is required, an HPC System for Manufacturing can be configured with multiple VDI servers,
with a recommendation to include one VDI server per 1-4 power users or 1-16 standard users.
The recommended configuration for VDI servers is:
• Dell PowerEdge R730 server
• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 processors
• 512 GB of memory, 16 x 32 GB 2400 MT/s DIMMs
• PERC H730 RAID controller
• 2 x 600 GB 10K SAS drives in RAID 1 (for operating system)