Talk About HPC Bang For Your Buck, How About Ka-Boom For The Server Room

Performance

As I mentioned, the Appro 1U Tetra GPU Server is a truck load of number crunching hardware. Indeed, the Appro Tetra GPU was benchmarked at an amazing 1116 GigaFLOPS by NVidia. Yes, that is correct 1.1 TeraFLOPS. According to NVidia this is the first 1U to break the TeraFLOP limit. A little perspective may be helpful. Without the additional GPUs, the 12 cores provided by the dual Intel X5670 can reach 121 GigaFLOPS (I have seen reports of 130 GigaFLOPS, but I have data for the 121 GigaFLOPS number). If you subtract that from 1116 and divide by four, you get 248 GigaFLOPS per Tesla M2050. Of course, your application, which is probably not Linpack based, will determine your actual performance.

I decided to try running HPL (High Performance Linpack) on my own. Appro and NVidia provided me with the software and some pointers on how to run…

1. SMMscale: The Next HPC Challenge
2. Smashing (and) the HPL Benchmark
3. Small Hardware and Big Software at SC10
4. High Performance Community
5. Round Two of the OpenMP-MPI Smack-Down