Appro announced yesterday a new rack-system that combines Tesla blades with traditional clusters to pack 78 TeraFlops into a single rack. Appro is a small niche player in the HPC space, but has decided to join the ranks of the GPGPU elite with this offering. Why so late to the game? They were waiting for more “proficient” GPGPU offerings, which NVidia has finally offered in the Tesla’s latest Double-precision support. However, they’re really waiting for the next generation of cards.
The exact design of these future Tesla co-processors is not known but Lee hinted that it would be a lot more elegant than the current Tesla PCI-Express cards and would have much better double-precision performance too.
So what’s the actual rack?
The Appro HyperPower puts 19 of the twin Nehalem EP servers interleaved in a standard 42U rack with 19 of the Tesla appliances, which yields 304 x64 cores and 18,240 GPU cores. The peak performance of such a rack weighs in at just over 78 teraflops on single-precision codes and 6.56 teraflops at double-precision math. Here’s the scary bit – and it’s not surprising: One of these Tesla appliances burns at 800 watts when it is working hard.
