Storage and energy-efficiency hardware are nowadays a recurrent feature of the high-performance computing scene. And, in addition to those technologies already listed in our Show Preview, announcements have recently been made in both areas, as recounted in this, our fourth news report from SC15.
CoolIT Systems has new server cooling technologies plus an expanded line of heat exchange solutions. In particular, it will be debuting ‘Revelstoke’, a rack-mounted system capable of managing upwards of 80kW and 120 nodes with warm water cooling. It will also display its full range of centralised pumping liquid to liquid/air heat exchangers and rear-door technologies, setting up a two-rack liquid cooled data centre alongside examples of liquid cooled servers from Dell, Lenovo, Intel, Supermicro, Huawei, Penguin Computing, and more.
It will also be showing EP2 and RP2 liquid cooling solutions for the upcoming Intel Xeon Phi processor known as ‘Knights Landing’. These server modules come in a pumped version and a low profile passive version for high-density server configurations.
Case studies for HPC centres such as the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre, and the Centre of Biological Sequence Analysis at the Technical University of Denmark will be presented.
DataDirect Networks (DDN), meanwhile, has launched its new SFA14K and SFA14KE hybrid storage and hyper-converged platforms. The company claims to deliver the world’s fastest, densest storage with more than 6 million IOPS and 60GB/sec in 4U with scalability to nearly 7PB of capacity in a single rack. The SFA14K is a hybrid block storage array, while the SFA14KE hyper-converged solution allows users to use the embedded processor to run virtual machines, embedded applications and file systems within the storage array so as to reduce complexity, latency, and data centre footprint.
Data intensive Enterprise and HPC organisations all require a new approach to data compute, storage, and management that allows them to keep pace with the rapid acceleration of processor power and both machine and sensor generated data. While DDN delivers software-only options for both the IME application acceleration and WOS object storage offerings, and embraces the need for commodity hardware to fill a necessary space in the datacentre, proprietary hardware platforms are in increasingly urgent demand for environments requiring high density performance and capacity coupled with low latency for analytics and file storage.
Molly Rector, CMO and executive vice president product management and worldwide marketing for DDN, said: ‘While many storage vendors have discontinued investing in hardware innovation, DDN consistently executes a product strategy to break through bottlenecks in the data centre. And while DDN has embraced the movement to deliver software technology on commodity hardware, we also recognize that commodity storage platforms simply cannot keep pace with rapidly increasing compute power, network bandwidth and the latest generation NVMe and SSD speeds.’
