Continuing with its aggressive expansion plans, Supermicro launched its servers and for the Magny-Cours i.e. Opteron 6100 Series processors. Among a series of different form factors, we noticed one that looked a bit special.
Supermicro's eight Socket server for AMD's Opteron 6100 seriesIn the past two years, Supermicro started to put blade motherboards into 1U rack chassis and internally connecting them with a high speed bus. Given the hot plug nature of the motherboards in question, downtime was non-existent if one of motherboards would go awry - a nightmare for the server admins. With the Opteron 6100, Supermicro launched a "2U Twin2 system" - no less than four hot pluggable motherboards with two sockets each. Long story short, this setup will support 96 processing cores and no less than 1TB of DDR3-1333 of system memory. Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro stated that "The introduction of quad-channel DDR3 on these new 8- and 12-Core servers doubles the memory capacity and can accelerate memory performance up to 66%, especially for large data sets."
According to AMD's specs, bandwidth per processor is 42.66 GB/s which would mean that this 2U can offer a staggering 341.25 GB/s of aggregated bandwidth. Unfortunately, that is what DDR3 at 1.33 GHz can provide in four DIMM per Socket mode. The truth, though, is somewhat different. By clocking the memory controller and the L3 cache at only 1.8 GHz [well-known painful spot of K10/10.5 architecture], AMD crippled its own bandwidth to "just" 28.8 GB/s per socket, and this server will offer you a grand total of 230.4 GB/s. All in all, these are quite impressive figures, even with this self-castrated processor.
Supermicro's power supplies are some of world's best self-manufactured 80 Plus Gold certified 1400W power supplies. Just like everything else, the whole setup is being manufactured in Supermicro's facilities in San Jose, CA. In a way, it is interesting to see how a progressive company such as Supermicro concluded that off-shoring the manufacturing to the Far East doesn't pay off in the long run - at the same time when its competitors moved even the design teams to the Far East or just hire Supermicro or a similar company to create a product for them.
Naturally, this high-density system cannot offer GPU support, however there are 12 3.5" Hot-Swap HDD Bays [three per node]. In order to connect the four motherboards, you can opt for a 40Gbps QDR InfiniBand connection.
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