Graphics solutions for blades

[chuckk281]

Eirik had a graphics processor blades question:

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Hi experts.

I have  a customer who recently purchased a lot of BL460c G7s and they now discover that they need GPU processing for their applications.

So the question is, can the Nvidia-cards for the workstation blades work in a regular BL460c ? (what is really the difference between the two except OS support?).

I’m guessing the answer is “it will work” but “is not supported”, am I right ?

So the only two options for the customer is :

-          Buying WS460c with Nvidia cards

-          Buying PCI-expansion blades

Or do we have any other viable solutions ?

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Dan replied:

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There are potentially multiple issues here.  But, yes, we are talking about unsupported configurations around the BL460c G7.

I am assuming your customer needs the GPUs for compute on their applications, and they are not trying to deliver a graphics experience to an end user.  If yes, the best way to achieve this is in a Blade form factor is our WS460c with Graphics Expansion Blade.  The Graphics Expansion Blade can house high end NVIDIA Tesla cards (like M2070Q) for doing GPU compute.

The issues:

-          The Graphics Expansion Blade is ONLY supported with the WS460c Blade.  I do not know if it is even physically possible to connect the Graphics Expansion to a BL460c G7.  And, obviously, nothing has been tested.

-          The WS460c Blade never went to G7, but remained at G6 .  Does the customers have a need for the FiberChannel capability that was part of the G7 LOM?

How many systems are we talking about that need GPU compute?  If it is a relatively small number of their systems, could they potentially purchase WS460c Blades with the Graphics Expansion to meet the GPU needs?

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Any other suggesitons for Eirik?