HP Expands SL6500 Scalable Server Node Line, Including 8-GPU Version

Included among the new servers are HP's first scalable server nodes to feature AMD processors, as well as a server featuring the highest GPU density in the industry, said Glenn Keels, director of marketing for HP's worldwide service provider and high performance computing business.

The four new servers introduced this week are part of HP's ProLiant SL6500 Scalable System, which the company introduced in October. The SL6500 is based on a 4U modular server chassis system which scales from one to thousands of half-width and full-width server nodes which can be a mixture of 1U, 2U, and 4U form factors.

The ProLiant SL6500 provides common power supplies and cooling to all the servers in the chassis, allowing the individual server nodes to be lighter in weight while performing as well as the more traditional servers from which the nodes are built, Keels said.

"It's lean and mean," he said. "There's not a ton of bells and whistles. But it allows a lot of options, easy serviceability, and shared power and cooling to increase efficiency. And it provides the capability to cap power at both the chassis level and the rack level."

New to the ProLiant SL650 system are the SL160s and SL165s, two 1U, full-width server nodes based on the HP ProLiant DL160 and DL165 servers. The SL160s features one or two Intel Xeon 5600 processors and up to 192 GBs of DDR3 memory. The SL165s is based on AMD's 12-core Opteron 6000 (Magny-Cours) processor, and comes with one or two processors and up to 288 GBs of memory.

HP also unveiled the SL335s, a half-width, 1U node based on the AMD Opteron 4100 processor. It can be configured with up to 128 GBs of memory. "It's targeted at dedicated hosting as well as Web customers who don't require extreme performance," Keels said.

Also new is the ProLiant SL390s, a half-width, 4U server with room for up to two Intel Xeon 5500 or Xeon 5600 processors. The SL390s comes with InfiniBand and 10-Gbit Ethernet connectivity and up to eight GPUs, giving it the greatest integrated GPU density of all server vendors, Keels said.

"It's designed for high-performance applications," he said. "It includes room for eight hot-plug small form factor hard drives for customers who like to 'strap' a hard drive to a GPU, like many companies do in the oil and gas field."

The four new server nodes complement the three introduced in October, including the SL170s G6 half-width, 1U node with up to two Intel Xeon processors and 192 GBs of memory, and two earlier versions of the ProLiant SL390s.

The new servers' list prices start at $1,475 for the SL160s with a single Intel E5620 processor and 6 GBs of memory.