HP Unveils HPC Blade

Hewlett-Packard in August will begin shipping a blade server for the high-performance computing space based on its new BladeSystem c-Class enclosure.

The HPC BladeSystem c-Class, introduced June 26 at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, offers 4X DDR InfiniBand support in the midplane, which also features 5TB per second of throughput. The InfiniBand technology can offer up to 20GB per second of bandwidth.

Resource Library:

The new offerings are being folded into the Palo Alto, Calif., companys Unified Cluster Portfolio, which offers a combination of hardware, software and services aimed at the HPC field.

The Cluster Platform 3000BL—running on Intel Xeon processors—and 4000BL—with Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices—will bring the c-Class into configurations optimized for the HPC space.

The 3000BL will be available in August, the 4000BL in the fall. The servers also will support HPs XC Cluster Software for Linux workloads.

Blades are growing increasingly popular in the high-performance computing space, which, according to analyst firm IDC, HP leads with a 33 percent market share, over IBMs 27 percent.

"We in the HPC world look at blades in the same respect as a really well-designed cluster," said Bruce Toal, marketing director of HPC for HP.

The additional of InfiniBand connectivity from Voltaire and Mellanox heightens the blades capabilities in the space, he said.

HPs BladeSystem c-Class servers run on both Intels 5000 and 5100 processors. The 5100 family, unveiled June 26, was formerly code-named "Woodcrest."

Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, views and analysis on servers, switches and networking protocols for the enterprise and small businesses.