Cirrascale Announces Next Generation of High-Density GB 5400 Blade Server for MSPs, Cloud Providers

The next generation of the GB5400 blade server has been announced by Cirrascale Corporation. The company builds independent blade-based computing and storage infrastructure for both conventional and modular data centers.

The new server supports up to eight discrete GPU cards in a single blade, and utilizes a pair of Cirrascale's proprietary 80-lane PCIe switch-enabled risers. The risers are designed to enable increased bandwidth, as well as lower latencies among GPU cards than are possible in traditional systems.

Since multiple GPUs may communicate on their own PCI bus without the need for host CPU intervention, GPUs may be clustered into a "micro-cluster," sharing a single memory address space. Flexible design enables support of up to eight GPU cards, like the NVIDIA Tesla, Quadro and GeForce lines, as well as the new GeForce GTX TITAN cards.

That series offers the fastest GPU available with 2,668 GPU cores that deliver 4.5 Teraflops of single precision, and 1.3 Teraflops of double precision processing power.

The GeForce cards, when used in the Cirrascale BladeRack 2 XL platform, may be scaled to offer 124.8 Teraflops of double precision processing power in one rack for an ultra-dense and high-performance cloud computing and GPU-accelerated solution.

The new GB5400 blade server and the entire GB series of solutions, as well as the Cirrascale PCIe switch-enabled riser, are available immediately. Licensing opportunities are also available for customers and partners. The solutions also feature Cirrascale's patented Vertical Cooling Technology, which provides energy-efficiency and standards with a low total cost of ownership, all within a dense form factor.

Solutions are aimed at managed service providers (MSP), cloud services and hosting providers, large-scale infrastructure operators and HPC users.

“We have redesigned the GB5400 to handle the latest cards from leading GPU providers, including NVIDIA and their wide assortment of high-end GPU cards,” said David Driggers, CEO at Cirrascale Corporation. “Our customers and licensed partners in cloud and high performance computing are asking for this increased density and performance, while maintaining the ability to scale the solutions they choose. We’re confident that the GB5400 meets these needs, and in fact, surpasses them.”