White Papers



EnteringaNewArenainComputing



By:MuniraHussain,December2016–HPCInnovationLab



Inordertobuildabalancedclusterecosystemandeliminatebottle‐necks,theneedforpowerfuland

denseservernodeconfigurationsisessentialtosupportparallelcomputing.Thechallengeistoprovide

maximumcomputepowerwithefficientI/Osubsystemperformance,includingmemoryand

networking.Someoftheemergingtechnologiesalongwithtraditionalcomputingthatareneededfor

intensecomputepowerareadvancedparallelalgorithmsintheareasofresearch,lifescienceand

financialapplication.



DellPowerEdgeC6320p



TheintroductionoftheDellEMCC6320pplatform,whichisoneofthedensestandgreatestmaximum

corecapacityplatformofferingsinHPCsolutions,providesaleapinthisdirection.

ThePowerEdgeC6320pplatformisDellEMC’sfirstself‐bootableIntelXeonPhiplatform.Thepreviously

availableversionsofIntelXeonPhiwerePCIEadaptersthatrequiredahostsystemtobepluggedinto.

Fromthecoreperspective,itsupportsupto72processingcores,witheachcoresupportingtwovector

processingunitscapableofAVX‐512instructions.Thisincreasesthecomputationoffloatingpoint

operationsrequiringlongervectorinstructionsunlikeIntelXeon®v4processorsthatsupportuptoAVX‐

2instructions.TheIntelXeonPhiinDellEMCC6320palsofeatureson‐package16GBoffastMCDRAM

thatisstackedontheprocessor.TheavailabilityofMCDRAMhelpsout‐of‐orderexecutionin

applicationsthataresensitivetohighmemorybandwidth.Thisisinadditiontothesixchannelsof

DDR4memoryhostedontheserver.Beingasinglesocketserver,theC6320pprovidesalowpower

consumptioncomputenodecomparedtotraditionaltwosocketnodesinHPC.



ThefollowingtableshowsplatformdifferencesaswecomparethecurrentDellEMCPowerEdge

C6320andDellEMCPowerEdgeC6320pserverofferingsinHPC.



PAGE 1
Entering a New Arena in Computing By: Munira Hussain, December 2016 – HPC Innovation Lab In order to build a balanced cluster ecosystem and eliminate bottle‐necks, the need for powerful and dense server node configurations is essential to support parallel computing. The challenge is to provide maximum compute power with efficient I/O subsystem performance, including memory and networking.
PAGE 2
C6320 Server Form Factor 2U Chassis with four sleds C6320p 2U Chassis with four sleds Processors Dual Socket Single Socket Processor Model Intel® Xeon Intel ® Xeon Phi Max cores in a sled Up to 44 physical cores, 88 logical cores Up to 72 physical cores, 288 logical cores (with two * Intel ® Xeon E5‐2699 v4, 2.2 GHz, 55MB, 22 cores, 145W) (with the Intel ®Xeon Phi Processor 7290 (16GB, 1.5GHz, 72 core, 245W) 1.26 TFlops/sec 2.
PAGE 3
Integrated Dell EMC Remote Access Controller Dedicated and shared iDRAC8 Dedicated and shared iDRAC8 Table 1: Comparing the C6320 and C6320p offering in HPC Dell EMC Supported HPC Solution: Dell EMC offers a complete, tested, verified and validated solution offering on the C6320p servers. This is based on Bright Cluster Manger 7.3 with RHEL 7.2 that includes specific highly recommended kernel and security updates. It will also provide support for the upcoming RHEL 7.3 operating system.
PAGE 4
References: 1) http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge‐c6320p/pd?ref=PD_OC 2) http://en.community.dell.