Appro Crams 4 Graphics Cards Inside 1U Server

Thanks to the high level of performance demonstrated in highly threaded applications such as video encoding and 3D rendering, GPU computing has really taken off lately, a large number of manufacturers releasing integrated CPU-GPU systems to the market, Appro just raising the ante by offering more GPUs than any other manufacturer in a small 1U package.

Dubbed the Tetra, this solution allows for 40 such units to be installed in a single rack, Appro making these servers available in two different versions, one based on an AMD platform while the other is built on top of an Intel solution.

This way Appro can cater to all sort of workloads, customers that run memory hungry applications preferring to go the AMD route since these systems can be configured with more memory and have more cores to address it.

On the other hand, systems built using Intel processors offer higher performance per core while also coming with greater memory and GPU bandwidth.

As far as the processor options go, on the AMD side users can choose from 8 or 12 core AMD Magny Cours processors, the Intel platforms coming with either 4 or 6 core Intel Xeon CPUs, both Tetra systems supporting dual-processor setups.

In addition, up to four Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs can be installed in one 1U server, each M2050 “computing module,” as Nvidia likes to call them, coming with 448 CUDA cores as well as 3GB of GDDR5 memory.

According to Appro, these new servers come as a response to the changes in HPC computing as the ideal CPU to GPU ratio has changed from the typical one to one.

Nowadays, GPU computing requirements usually call a two GPU to one CPU ratio, although this could still change as we are still in the early days of putting this technology to use. (via The Register)