Hardware Fusion

  In my last post , I went into detail describing the storage/compute servers that provide the storage cluster and most of the computing power in an IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI system .  In this post, I take a close look at one of the optional server types that can be added to a Spectrum Fusion HCI system, the GPU server .   It is an  NVIDIA-Certified System  that has passed certification tests to validate its performance, reliability, and scale for a wide range of workloads.   I detail the CPU, memory, storage, and network elements inside these GPU servers and, of course, the GPU adapters. CPU and Memory A Spectrum Fusion HCI GPU server is built from a Lenovo SR665 server that is two rack units (2U) high.  (A rack unit is an industry standard that translates to 1.75 inches; an industry standard data center rack used to hold servers and switches is 42U tall.)  Inside the server are two processor sockets that are each populated with an AMD EPYC 7F...

Previously, I provided an overview of the IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI hardware followed by posts giving an overview of the different server and switch components that go into that system. Most of the servers in an IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI system will be storage/compute servers, so you can think of these servers as the workhorses of the system. In this post, I take a closer look at the CPU, memory, storage, and network elements inside these storage/compute servers. CPU and Memory A storage/compute server is built from a Lenovo SR645 server that is one rack unit (1U) high.  (A rack unit is an industry standard that translates to 1.75 inches; an industry standard data center rack used to hold servers and switches is 42U tall.)  Inside the server are two processor sockets that are each populated with an AMD EPYC 7302 processor.  The EPYC 7302 is a 16-core, 32-thread, processor that operates with a base clock speed of 3.0 GHz.  With two of these process...