Nvidia Fermi GPGPU makes into 1U Servers from Supermicro & Appro

Due to high power requirements it has been extremely challenging to make a case for Tesla in 1U 19 inch rack-mount chassis. But both Supermicro & Appro have managed to fit Tesla GPUs. This is quiet an achievement as cooling is highly restricted in 1U form factor.

Appro has stuck 4 Nvidia GPUs in 1 U offering while using Intel’s older Xeon 5500 & 5600 chips. This goes back to imminent threat GPUs have posed to business model of CPU market, where CPUs controlled value of the platform. Appro 1U server is yet another example where you can live with cheaper CPUs in platform while delivering performance through GPGPUs. Code writers will definitely optimize performance away from CPU to GPGPUs in this case.

Supermicro’s solution is to stick 2 Tesla GPUs in 1 U offering while using AMD’s 12-core Opeteron 6100 series. Supermicro offers most of its 1U standard solutions with Intel’s quad-core & hexa-core processors. Supermicro has also announced 4U unit with 4 Tesla GPUs that has hot-swappable 1.4KW power supply units.

Use models: Target scientific research, natural resource exploration, financial simulation customers.

Overall I see these high performance niche solutions & would love to hear about any real buyers of this products! Both solutions offer extremely high performance but concerns will be around heat generation and cooling requirements in chassis. For Nvidia, they can keep some hopes alive for HPC oriented version on chip dubbed Tesla in 1U space.