Hewlett-Packard and Dell are continuing to build servers that bring graphics chips into the data center.
HP officials on May 17 announced that Nvidia’s new Tesla M2090 GPU (graphics processing unit) will appear in a number of upcoming HP ProLiant servers aimed at the HPC (high-performance computing) space, a move they say will address organizations’ demands for greater performance and energy efficiency.
The announcement from HP and Nvidia came a day after officials from Dell and Advanced Micro Devices, at the Microsoft TechEd show, said the server maker will roll out the PowerEdge M610x blade, which will include AMD’s FirePro V7800P GPUs. Officials with both Dell and AMD said the combination of Dell blades with AMD GPUs will help in such areas as HPC and desktop virtualization.
HPC organizations have been particularly strong adopters of GPUs for computing tasks. For workloads optimized for parallel processing, companies can get much more performance with GPUs—which offer hundreds of cores—than with traditional CPUs alone, and without increasing power consumption.
“The high performance computing (HPC) segment has an endless thirst for performance and this has made the use of GPUs a disruptive force,” Ed Turkel, marketing manager for HPC for HP, said in a May 17 blog post on the Nvidia Website. “For researchers, scientists and engineers, enhanced performance allows for faster innovation that will result in the kinds of discoveries that can change the world.”
Nvidia officials called the Tesla M2090 the world’s fastest parallel processing chip, which can hold as many as 512 cores and can offer application acceleration 10 times that of CPUs alone. The Tesla M2090 GPU will be available on HP’s new ProLiant SL390 G7 4U server, which Nvidia officials said was built specifically for hybrid computing environments that use both GPUs and CPUs.
For more, read the eWEEK article: HP, Dell Unveil Servers Powered by Nvidia, AMD.
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Hewlett-Packard 
