Appro Adds GPU Flexibility To Its GreenBlade System For Small To Mid-Size HPC Businesses

MILPITAS, Calif., May 4. Appro, a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, announced today the launch a new modular GPU expansion blade based on the new NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPU to be offered as a configuration option for the Appro GreenBlade System.

The Appro GreenBlade System is a building block blade solution offering a reliable, affordable and energy-efficient architecture for high performance computing applications. The Appro GreenBlade system is a great alternative to 1U servers for customers looking to consolidate server, storage, network, power and simplified management capabilities while providing performance, reliability, density, upgradeability and value. Configurations are complemented with storage or GPU expansion blades offering customers affordable mix and match compute and storage blade options in a single solution building block.

The Appro GreenBlade System comes in a 5U form factor and supports up to 10 server blades in one package. If configured as a CPU and GPU combination, the Appro GreenBlade GPU system supports 5 dual CPU server blades with 5 GPU expansion blades offering up to 4,480 GPU cores - delivering up to 5 TFlops of double precision performance per system. The Appro GreenBlade server is offered in two models; the Appro gB222X server hosted by the latest Intel Xeon processor and the Appro gB322H server hosted by the latest AMD Opteron processor. Both configurations offer integrated IPMI 2.0 remote server management capabilities, high-speed interconnect options and a choice of Linux or Windows operating systems. It also offers additional green features such as intelligent power control capabilities to dynamically power down pairs of GPUs to provide power savings for thermal efficiency and system reliability. Ideal customers are in Energy and Government Research followed by Bioinformatics and Finance industries in HPC market looking to deploy a reliable and energy efficient small to mid-size GPU systems.

"The IT departments in HPC market segments are always in the need for more computing performance while building a scalable and environmentally-friendly infrastructure that lowers total cost of ownership," said John Lee, VP of Advanced Technology Solutions of Appro. "The Appro GPU expansion blade based on NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs combines the latest technologies and affordable green computing to boost technical applications performance while offering a reliable, flexible and price competitive system architecture."

"Appro's high performance customers will benefit from the dramatic performance increases and HPC-targeted features of the NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs," said Andy Keane, General Manager of the Tesla Business Unit at NVIDIA. "The new Appro GreenBlade System separates the GPU blade from the CPU to simplify upgrade cycles for customers looking to get more computing power with long-term investment protection."