14 DAY TRIAL // Asus' server and workstation solutions line seems to have grown quite rapidly in the last couple of months, and the Taiwanese company has just expanded it yet again with the introduction of its first rackable 2U GPU server that can house up to four Nvidia Tesla GPUs and dual LGA 1366 Intel Xeon processors.
The new server is called the ESC4000 and Asus stated that, when combined with four Tesla M2050/2070 GPUs, it can deliver up to 1.07 TFLOPS double precision performance in Linpack.
The four graphics cards will work in an x16 mode, as the ESC4000 packs an Nvidia NF200 bridge chip, but the available bandwidth will drop to x8 if all the eight PCI Express slots are populated.
In addition, Asus also offers a PIKE slot in its server, that was specifically designed to accommodate a SAS add-on card.
When this isn't installed, users have to rely on the six SATA 3Gbps ports provided by the Intel ICH10R southbridge.
As far as the supported processors are concerned, the server is compatible with all Intel LGA 1366 CPUs (including six-core models) and it packs 18 DIMM sockets, which can support a maximum of 144GB DDR3 memory.
The Asus ESC4000 server also features support for up to eight hot-swappable drive bays, a pair of Intel 82574L NICs and an Ethernet management interface, an 1+1 redundant 1400W 80PLUS Gold power supply unit and one slim-type optical drive bay.
“Scientists, engineers and developers around the world are optimizing their applications to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of Tesla GPUs,” said Andy Keane, general manager of Tesla Business at Nvidia.
“The release of ASUS' ESC4000 is well-timed, and gives these professionals a high performance, energy efficient platform upon which to deploy their applications,” concluded Nvidia's rep.
No details regarding pricing and availability are public at this point.