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Dell - Internal Use - Confidential

Dell EMC HPC Systems - SKY is the limit

Munira Hussain, HPC Innovation Lab, July 2017

This is an announcement about the Dell EMC HPC refresh that introduces support for 14th

Generation servers based on the new Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable Family (micro-

architecture also known as “Skylake”). This includes the addition of PowerEdge R740,

R740xd, R640, R940 and C6420 servers to the portfolio. The portfolio consists of fully tested,

validated, and integrated solution offerings. These provide high speed interconnects,

storage, an option for both hardware and cluster level system management, and monitoring

software.

On a high level, the new generation Dell EMC Skylake servers for HPC provide greater

computation power, which includes support for up to 28 cores and memory speed up to

2667 MT/s; the architecture extends AVX instructions to AVX512. The AVX512 instructions

can execute up to 32 DP FLOP per cycle, which is twice the capability of the previous 13

generation servers that used Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors (“Broadwell”). Additionally,

the number of core counts per socket is 20% higher per system when compared to the

previous generation, which consisted of a maximum 22 cores. It consists of six memory

channels per socket; therefore, a minimum of 12 DIMMs are needed for a dual socket server

to provide up to full memory bandwidth. The chipset also has 48 PCI-E lanes per socket, up

from 40 lanes in the previous generation.

The table below notes the enhancements in the latest PowerEdge servers over the previous

generations:

High Level Comparison of the Dell EMC Server Generations for HPC Offering:

PowerEdge R730

(13

Generation Server)

PowerEdge R740

(14

Generation Server)

Chipset

Summary of content (6 pages)

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Dell EMC HPC Systems - SKY is the limit Munira Hussain, HPC Innovation Lab, July 2017 This is an announcement about the Dell EMC HPC refresh that introduces support for 14th Generation servers based on the new Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable Family (microarchitecture also known as “Skylake”). This includes the addition of PowerEdge R740, R740xd, R640, R940 and C6420 servers to the portfolio. The portfolio consists of fully tested, validated, and integrated solution offerings.
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CPU and Chipset PCH Front Side Bus Cores (max) Grantly with Broadwell –EP Wellsburg DMI2 Lewisburg DMI3 Intel® QuickPath Intel® UltraPath Interconnect Interconnect Processor and cores 22 cores 28 cores TDP (max) Instruction Set Max DP FLOPS/CLK Memory Channels per Socket Memory Speed (upto max speed) NVDIMM GPGPU x16 PCIE Risers PERC HardDrive System Management IDRAC IP Source (Factory default) IDRAC Login (Factory default) System Management tools Purley with Skylake 145W 205W AVX2 16 per core (w/A
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Max Total System Memory BW (STREAM TRIAD) Theoretical max System Performance (HPL) *This is based on the max core – memory configuration 130 (GBps) 1DCP with 2400 MT/s 215 (Gbps) 2DPC with 2666 MT/s 1.4 TFlops 3.2 Tflops (Dual Socket – 22 c , 145W, 2400 MT/s) based on AVX2 (Dual Socket – 28 c, 205W, 2666 MT/s ) Based on AVX-512 code The HPC release supporting Dell EMC 14G servers is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 operating system. It is based on the 3.10.0-514.el7.x86_64 kernel.
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 Additional Machine Learning packages such as TensorFlow, Caffe, Cudnn, Digits and required dependencies are also supported and available for download Below are some images of the Bright Cluster Manager 8.0 BrightView: Figure1: This shows the overview of the Cluster. It displays the total capacity, usage, and job status. Figure 2: Displays the cascading view of Cluster configuration and respective settings within a group. The settings can be modified and applied from the console.
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Figure 3: Dell EMC Settings Tab shows the parsed info on hardware configuration and the required BIOS level settings. Dell EMC HPC Systems based on the 14th Generation servers expand HPC computation capacity and demands. They are fully balanced and architected solutions that are validated and verified for the customers, and the configurations are scalable. Please stay tuned as follow-on blogs will cover performance and application study; these will be posted here: http://en.community.dell.
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Dell - Internal Use - Confidential