HPE Goes Cray For NVIDIA's Blackwell GPUs, Crams 224 Into A Single Cabinet
The Register, Thursday, November 14th, 2024
If you thought Nvidia's 120 kW NVL72 racks were compute dense with 72 Blackwell accelerators, they have nothing on HPE Cray's latest EX systems, which will pack more than three times as many GPUs into a single cabinet.
Announced ahead of next week's Super Computing conference in Atlanta, Cray's EX154n platform will support up to 224 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and 8,064 Grace CPU cores per cabinet. That works out to just over 10 petaFLOPS at FP64 for HPC applications or over 4.4 exaFLOPS of FP4 for sparse AI and machine learning workloads, where precision usually isn't as big a deal.
Specifically, each EX154n accelerator blade will feature a pair of 2.7 kW Grace Blackwell Superchips (GB200), each of which is equipped with two Blackwell GPUs and a single 72-core Arm CPU. Those two Superchips will be interconnected by Nvidia's NVL4 reference configuration.