Aurora Systems : A cutting edge, green, reliable range of HPC systems Eurotech

Aurora Systems

A cutting edge, green, reliable range of HPC systems

The Aurora HPC systems product line includes Intel Xeon E5 and Xeon 5600 series processors based solutions that accommodate different needs in performance, power, size, cooling and appication:

Large size supercomputers, mounted on 19’’ cabinets, entirely hot liquid cooled and connected to external free coolers
Mid-size HPC systems of up to 128 nodes, hot liquid cooled with external or standalone heat exchangers
Small yet powerful systems of up to 16 nodes, with standalone hot liquid cooling, optionally mounted on portable, partially or totally rugged enclosures.

General DescriptionFeaturesSpecificationsAccessories

The Aurora HPC 10-10 excels in density, energy efficiency and reliability: it can thermally manage the top of the Xeon E5 series, the E5-2687W at 3.1 Ghz (150 W TDP) this means a standard rack of the Aurora HPC 10-10 can propel 100 Tflops of pure CPU computational power at 110 Kw of peak consumption. That is 1 Petflop in 15 m2 or 160 sqft. Such densities are possible because of a hot cooling system (coolant at 50°C +) that has improved compared to the previous AU 5600 supercomputer, becoming even more efficient in extracting heat from the system.

The HPC 10-10 inherits the efficient power conversion of the AU 5600 and allow data center PUEs as low as 1.05. This means great energy savings and together with a very respectable 900 Mflops/W this means also the Aurora high performance computer is one of most efficient and greenest systems in the market
Eurotech has leveraged their long experience in developing embedded systems, to bring to HPC1 0-10 a high degree of RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability). The 10-10 has no moving parts, no hot spots, no noise. It has 3 independent sensor networks, soldered memory and its nodes are very manageable 50x16 cm (19”x6”) blades, hot pluggable despite being liquid cooled. Also, there is limited cabling inside each rack, where the backplanes are handling most of the I/O communication

High computational power

Aurora uses the latest and fastest technology available. A high end solution, capable to deliver unparalleled computational power, maintaining all of the flexibility and compatibility of a CPU based x86 solution.

High packaging density

Aurora systems are the best in class in terms of computing density per unit rack. Aurora mounting Sandy Bridge can have up to to 4096 cores/512 CPUs/256 blades hosted in a single 48U rack. In other words, this means over 66 Tflops per m2, or 2 Petaflops in a studio flat! A reduced floor occupation and easier installation.

Hot liquid cooling

Aurora removes component generated heat using hot liquid cooling (water up to 50 °C), with no need for air conditioning, in any climate zone. This allows reaching a data center PUE as low as 1.05.

Thermal Energy Reuse

Each Aurora computational node can produce a temperature gap between 3 °C and 5 °C in the cooling liquid. Setting up more the racks in a multistage heating configuration, it is possible to warm up the coolant enough to be utilized for producing air conditioning, generating electricity or simply heating a building.

Cooling directly on the components

Direct on component liquid cooling, a feature that limits on board hot spots.

Reliability and availability

Quality, on component liquid cooling, redundancy of all critical components, vibration less functioning, solid state storage, temperature control, monitoring networks (IPMI), ease of maintenance and last but not least Eurotech HPC experience contribute to high reliability and longer system availability.

No moving parts

Aurora doesn’t shake, rattle or make noise. It does not have moving fans or require a dedicated room for installation.

Unified network architecture

An Infiniband switched network coexists with an optional FPGA driven 3D Torus nearest neighbor network.

Synchronization networks

Three independent synchronization networks (system, subdomain and local) preserve efficiency at Petascale by guaranteeing that the communication and the scheduling of all nodes are automatically handled.

Excellent design and ease of maintainability

While the Aurora supercomputers show an appealing design, they have been thought to guarantee ease of access and operation to easy maintenance.

Computing performance

from 42 to over 100 Tflops/rack
Power consumption

340W-390W/node, 11.2kW/chassis, 90kW - 100 KW/rack typ.
CPU

Intel Xeon E5 and Xeon 5600 series
from 3072 to 4096 cores/rack
Memory

8/16/32 GB or above soldered on board ECC DDR3 SDRAM per node
6/12/24 GB or above soldered on board ECC DDR3 SDRAM per node
Memory bandwidth: 40 GB per second per node
Local Storage

80 / 160 / 256 / 512 / 1024 GB 1.8” SATA disk
80 / 160 / 256 GB 1.8” SATA SSD
Interconnect

QDR Infiniband port per node (BW: 40Gbps, Latency <2us)
20+20 QDR IB ports (QSFP connections) per chassis
OPTIONAL: 1+1 3D Torus nearest neighbour switchless per node (BW:60+60Gbps, Latency: ~1us )
Power supply

External ACDC converter (85-300VAC to 48VDC), n+1 redundant, 97% efficiency
In rack DCDC trays (48VDC to 10VDC), 97% efficiency
Cooling

Entirely liquid cooled, ambient heat spillage <2%
Monitoring and Control

IPMI 960 measurement points per rack.
Physical Characteristics
* Dimensions (Rack): H 2260mm x W 1095mm x D 1500mm

Weight (Maximum): 1560kg (3440 lbs.) per fully populated rack
Acoustical Noise Level: <20 dB at 1 m

Adoption of Intel processors ensures compatibility with a vast range of applications, tools, OS's and specific HPC middleware. The advantage of being x86-based allows Aurora to have an almost unlimited choice of compilers, debuggers, libraries, applications, OS's, specific HPC middleware, clustering and administration tools, open source or proprietary.