Dell Introduces Server With 96 CPU Cores

From PC World: Dell on Monday introduced a server that can accommodate up to 96 CPU cores -- a big boost in the computational power provided by its hardware.

The Dell PowerEdge C6145 is one of the fastest servers the company has ever introduced, said Armando Acosta, a PowerEdge-C product manager at Dell. The server includes two four-socket nodes for up to eight 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processors.

The server is designed to run scientific or math applications and can also be used in cloud and virtualized computing environments, Acosta said. An external chassis with multiple graphics processors can also be attached to the server for applications such as video rendering.

There is a growing demand by customers for more performance in servers that consume less power, said Tim Carroll, director and global lead of research computing at Dell. Power caps are being assigned to buildings, so customers are also looking to save energy by consolidating servers.

Dell is working with component vendors to meet those power and performance requirements. The company is offering Samsung's low-power memory with the server and chips from Advanced Micro Devices because those have more CPU cores than Intel's chips, which offer a maximum of eight cores. Dell won't offer Intel chips on the server for now, Acosta said.

More customers are also looking to add graphics processors alongside CPUs to create clusters for certain applications, Acosta said. Servers with GPUs may use more power, but they also can handle more work, which may reduce the need to pack more servers into a data center.

View: Article @ Source Site