HP Apollo: a 100 per cent liquid cooled supercomputer

HP has launched a group of Apollo high-performance computing [HPC] systems that are able to bring performance to the table that is four times higher than standard rack servers.

The new family of products bring advancements in both power distribution and cooling techniques that mean the HP Apollo portfolio boasts a higher level of performance and density at a vastly lower cost of ownership.

“Demand for HPC applications across industries is growing rapidly, and today’s data centres are ill-equipped to handle the extensive space, power and infrastructure necessary to run the required level of processing power,” said Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager, Servers and Networking, HP. “Only HP has the intellectual property, portfolio, services and support to transform the supercomputing market today to accelerate the pace of innovation for tomorrow.”

HP’s Apollo 6000 system is designed to bring HPC for the enterprise with a flexible rack design that has a wide range of adapters as well as power redundancy that allows customers to optimise the system for their own specific needs.

The system’s Advanced Power Manager means that it can manage up to 160 servers per rack that bring greater performance whilst using 46 per cent less energy and lowering total operational expenses.

The Apollo 8000 system, meanwhile, is the world’s first 100 per cent liquid-cooled supercomputer with built-in technology protecting the hardware and addressing concerns of damage to the HPC system. It can accommodate up to 144 servers per rack and offers four times the teraflops per rack compared to air-cooled designs.

Customers are also able to recycle warm water to cool the system as a heat source for facilities and the US National Renewable Energy Labs [NREL] used it to create one of the greenest data centres in the world and savings are estimated at $1 million [£600,000] per year.

Demand for HPC is also addressed by the Helion Self-Service HPC private cloud solution that provides a self-service portal that has high performance compute resources accessed through a user-friendly interface.

Both HP Apollo solutions are available to order from HP and channel partners from today with prices on request.