HP ProLiant DL288 Visualization and Acceleration in HP ProLiant servers - Page 5

Acceleration application areas Acceleration applications exist in almost any endeavor that requires large-scale computationally intensive problem solving. There are off-the-shelf applications available, although a significant percentage of Acceleration applications are developed in-house by customers addressing very specific needs. The following list indicates some of the typical acceleration applications areas.  Scientific research - Computational chemistry and biology - Genetic research  Engineering - Engineering analysis - Signal processing - Seismic processing - Video transcoding  Business and financial - Business Intelligence - Database analytics - Financial analysis - Risk management Support for visualization and acceleration products in ProLiant servers Visualization and Acceleration products place greater demands on system resources than most other hardware add-ins. HP Engineering has invested extensive time and effort to ensure that the HP ProLiant server platforms provide the best support possible for these products and for the applications that use them. I/O bandwidth and mechanical support Almost all high-end visualization and acceleration applications involve the manipulation of massive data and results sets. Although most GPU-based accelerators use onboard memory to contain and process data sets, most high-end applications require the movement of large data and result sets between system memory and the accelerator board. Accomplishing this quickly and efficiently requires a great deal of I/O bandwidth. In order to provide the best support for accelerator products, HP has incorporated true x16 PCI Express slots into many of its ProLiant servers. On servers using the new 5 Gb/s per-lane signaling rate of PCIe 2.0, these x16 slots are capable of providing 8 GB/s of send and receive bandwidth, for a total bandwidth of up to 16 GB/s. Additionally, many of the x16 slots incorporated into ProLiant servers support full length, full height PCIe cards, which is a requirement for most accelerator cards. Many of the more powerful accelerator cards occupy the space of two physical slots. Although these cards are not supported on the smaller 2U servers, they are supported on some of the larger servers. Power and cooling support As high-performance compute engines, accelerator cards can use significantly more power than most other PCIe cards. This isn't surprising, considering that a typical graphic processor by itself can 5