Reference Guide

System Building Blocks
5 Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC Digital Manufacturing with AMD EPYC™ Processors—ANSYS®
Performance
2 System Building Blocks
The Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC Digital Manufacturing is designed using preconfigured building
blocks. The building block architecture allows an HPC system to be optimally designed for specific end-user
requirements, while still making use of standardized, domain-specific system recommendations. The available
building blocks are infrastructure servers, storage, networking, and compute building blocks. Configuration
recommendations are provided for each of the building blocks which provide good performance for typical
applications and workloads within the manufacturing domain. This section describes the available building
blocks along with the recommended server configurations.
With this flexible building block approach, appropriately sized HPC clusters can be designed based on
individual customer workloads and requirements. Figure 1 shows three example HPC clusters designed using
the Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC Digital Manufacturing architecture.
Figure 1 Example Ready Solutions for HPC Digital Manufacturing
2.1 Infrastructure Servers
Infrastructure servers are used to administer the system and provide user access. They are not typically
involved in computation, but they provide services that are critical to the overall HPC system. These servers
are used as the master nodes and the login nodes. For small sized clusters, a single physical server can
provide the necessary system management functions. Infrastructure servers can also be used to provide
storage services, by using NFS, in which case they must be configured with additional disk drives or an
external storage array. One master node is mandatory for an HPC system to deploy and manage the system.
If high-availability (HA) management functionality is required, two master nodes are necessary. Login nodes
are optional and one login server per 30-100 users is recommended.