On the Dell EMC World 2016 floor we saw a Knights Landing 4-node-in-2U bootable system from the company. Intel and Dell EMC recently notched a win for the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s (TACC) Stampede 2 supercomputer. We covered the original Stampede supercomputer at the initial Xeon Phi launch years ago. Dell EMC is taking advantage of this generation’s bootable format and is releasing a 4 node system that fits in 2U.
The Dell EMC 4-node-in-2U Knights Landing System
At Dell EMC World 2016 we saw a “red board” KNL system casually displayed. Red boards are development PCBs that are not a shipping product so please do keep that in mind. We see that the sled is less than half the width of a standard 19″ rack which allows for two hot-swap nodes to be installed side-by-side along with a PSU. This configuration is one we have seen from QCT, Supermicro, ASRock Rack and others.
One intriguing feature we saw was a 1.8″ SSD placed on the PCB. The booth representative told us it was a NVMe SSD however markings indicate that this is a 240GB 1.8″ Samsung PM863, a SATA SSD.
We also saw a similar 1U thermal solution to what we have seen in other servers.
We outlined for the LGA3647 socket in this video:
The four screw and two pin mounting solution should be popular in the coming months.
KNL’s Near Future: Add-in Cards
With the Supercomputing conference set to kick off in a few weeks, one area that we also see taking off is the launch of add-in card form factors for the KNL platform. We have been told that these will hit the market in the November/ December timeframe.
We do expect that this 4-node system will start shipping from Dell EMC in the next month. We would expect to get an update on these developments at Supercomputing in November.
