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Saturday, March 20, 2010
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Maybe possible; not recommended by: Craig Dunwoody on 11/27/2009
Hi Theo,

Some configs of HP DL160se-G6 have two available PCIe-x16-Gen2 expansion card slots, one full-height and one low-profile. There are
a number of PCIe extension products that could be used to connect this server to 6+ GPU cards mounted in external chassis.

I don't know if this type of config is specifically what Intel and HP had in mind to promote at SC09, but I think that it's at least possible.

As one example, you can plug in two NVIDIA Host Interface Cards (HICs), one full-height dual-port and one low-profile single-port. Each HIC port drives two GPUs, e.g. half of Tesla-S1070. You can therefore get six external GPUs connected, and if this server's mainboard BIOS can actually support that many GPUs, you can actually use them.

There are also a number of companies, e.g. www.nextio.com also exhibiting at SC09, offering various generic PCIe expansion chassis that might be able to connect 6+ external GPUs to this HP unit.

I personally believe that for many multi-GPU applications, a more efficient approach is to mount GPUs inside servers. Advantages include lower hardware cost/complexity, better hardware reliability, and in some cases also better performance, by giving each GPU card a dedicated true PCIe-x16-Gen2 8+8 GByte/sec (peak) full-duplex path all the way from CPUs.

As you pointed out, a number of companies
including Supermicro and Tyan currently offer relatively space-efficient 1RU and 4RU rackmountable server models that can support up to 2, 4, or 8 internal high-end 2slot-wide GPU cards, each with dedicated true PCIe-x16-Gen2 interface.

Several companies ran demos at SC09 using these servers as system building blocks. My company (www.graphstream.com) showed Supermicro and Tyan based 6GPU and 7GPU server configs in the Mellanox and Los Alamos Nat'l Lab booths.
Kakkoii by: Kakkoii on 11/26/2009
Intel knows the GPGPU market is going to rise, and since they have their own GPU in the works, it makes sense for them to show face with GPGPU. Trying to set their spot in this blossoming industry.
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