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5 Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Digital Manufacturing—Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+™ Performance | January 31, 2018
2 System Building Blocks
The Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Digital Manufacturing is assembled by using preconfigured building
blocks. The available building blocks are infrastructure servers, storage, networking, 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
customizable HPC system based on 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 recommended system configurations.
2.1 Infrastructure Servers
The infrastructure servers are used to administer the system and provide user access. They are not typically
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 these functions. The infrastructure server can also be used for storage, by using NFS, in
which case 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.
A recommended base configuration for infrastructure servers is:
 Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 server
 Dual Intel® Xeon® Bronze 3106 processors
 192 GB of memory, 12 x 16GB 2667 MT/s DIMMS
 PERC H330 RAID controller
 1 x 800GB Mixed-use SATA SSD
 Dell EMC iDRAC9 Enterprise
 2 x 750 W power supply units (PSUs)
 Mellanox EDR InfiniBand
TM
(optional)
The recommended base configuration for the infrastructure server is described here. The PowerEdge R640
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 3106 processor, with 8 cores
per socket, is sufficient for this role. 192 GB of memory provided by 12x16 GB DIMMs provides sufficient
memory capacity, with minimal cost per GB, while also providing good memory bandwidth. These servers are
not expected to perform much I/O, so a single Mixed-use SATA SSD should be sufficient for the operating
system. For small systems (four nodes or less), an 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 EMC NFS Storage Solution
(NSS) or Dell EMC Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre (IEEL) storage solution.