Build a top-100 supercomputer with 100 servers

According to HP, you can build a system that ranks among the top 100 supercomputers in the world out of their new servers.

Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager for Industry Standard Servers and Software at HP, introduced their new ProLiant SL6500 scalable system along with their new line of servers at a press event in Barcelona, Spain.

The philosophy of the SL architecture is to use a common modular architecture for any application to any scale, Potter said.

Two new servers, the SL170 and SL390, make use of HP’s modular architecture and it’s with 100 SL390s that Potter said a top-100 supercomputer can be built.

While the SL170 is their most energy efficient model, the seventh generation SL390 contains three general purpose GPUs (GPGPU) and is able to deliver 1 teraFLOP (or one thousand billion floating point operations per second) worth of compute power.

Potter said that the SL390 servers take up 77% less space and operate at 71% lower cost compared to what is currently on the market. A single rack of SL390s, Potter said, creates the 113th fastest supercomputer in the world.

HP reckons they can build a “top 100 supercomputer” using a hundred SL390s, running at 77 TFLOPs, Potter said.

According to Potter it would take 952 servers from their competitors to achieve the same result.

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Jan Vermeulen was a guest of HP at a media and partner event in Barcelona