Introduction
Nowadays, the battlefield is rapidly shifting; the winning requires a thorough understanding and knowledge of tactics. The combat tactics are all about the art and technology. Especially the high performance military application, the edge computing equipment (GPU server) with high bandwidth data ingest components tied to intrusion detection and assessment camera, radar, and LIDAR sensors, high capacity and low latency storage subsystems and high-performance compute engines that can perform the AI machine learning and inference tasks. Also the quick access and the ability to share complex, real-time data with battlefield commanders, who in turn push select information all the way down to the front-line warfighter, hence efficient and accurate performance is definitely required and strongly emphasized.
In this way, IT operators will no longer be disturbed by numerous interfaces, monitors and humongous servers. Various and complex system connecting one another should work coordinately, interpreting the received data and representing the commander's order. All data and assets can be managed from one location.
Ideal hardware utilization, expansion potentials and high efficiency operation are further guaranteed. In battlefield reality, where one second difference defines success and failure, the application of GPU server has become indispensable.
AV1000 rugged liquid cooled GPU server optimizes with excellent 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors. In a scenario where virtual machine is integrated with C4ISR system, the 40-core processor allows the CPU resources be reallocated to one or more virtual machines. AV1000 also equipped with high-capacity DDR4 memory, and leading-edge thermal management (liquid cooled), it combines impressive compute power, data-handling capabilities, and storage capacity (48TB NVMe in 2U) in a rugged solution that can withstand harsh conditions and demanding environments —including potholes, collisions, shock and vibration, and extreme temperatures that cause traditional systems to fail.
1-1 Why Liquid Cooling is Important?
In order to reduce the latency and improved the performance, CPUs, GPUs, and other components on board are moving closer, resulting in increased physical density and temperature within the server. Plus the data center rack power densities continue to increase, that will generate a tremendous amount of heat. The heat needs to be removed to protect the equipment, the liquid cooling’s benefits are being explored as an important and required solution in data centers.
PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is a ratio that describes how efficiently a computer in data center uses energy. It is also a standard of the power consumption of cooling system, and the ideal PUE ratio is 1.0. Take a look of the overall power consumption of data center, next to the IT systems themselves, cooling system is the biggest energy consumer in data center, that’s why cooling system have such a big impact on PUE. One of the major expenses in data centers is also the power usage. Traditional air cooling system needs more energy to drive high RPM motor, and the PUE is up to 1.6. The PUE of conduction liquid cooling can lower to 1.1, Liquid cooling consumes less energy, and it dissipate the heat more efficiently that allows servers to be operated at higher ambient temperatures.
1-2 What is C.L.C.P?
The liquid cooling can be a good solution to dissipate the heat. But most liquid cooling solutions are using close loop design — Direct to Chip (D2C) integrated pump & cold plate in the system. Some people may worry about liquid cooling solution might be a disaster because of the potential risk of leakage of the liquid. But once we prevent the leakage of the liquid, it becomes an utmost thermal solution.
In order to effectively reduce overall temperature and prevent the leakage of the liquid, 7Starlake innovated a unique heat exchanger which integrating Conduction Liquid Cold Plate (C.L.C.P.) building in most advanced " Gun Drilled ", which with 10 pipes (each pipe 5mm x 5mm x 𝝿 x 500mm) to dissipate max 4KW heat on the computing system. A gun-drilled liquid cold plate is manufactured by drilling a series of deep holes into an aluminum plate to form the liquid flow path.
The features of gun-drilled cold plates are adaptable to any temperature range; satisfying the flatness requirements; and avoiding the risk of leakage.
CLCP includes multi-channel cold liquid inlet/outlet owning high flexibility in adjusting numbers of inlet/outlet by request. When coolant flows through top sink, liquid can absorb the heat and take it away from the heat sources quickly to the heat exchanger. Leveraging both liquid-cooling and air-cooling’s strong points; these features accomplish higher rack density and efficiency, comprehensive reduction in power use, and increase of overclocking potential.
2. AV1000 Breakthrough Performance in New AI Inference
2-1. Outstanding Performance with Powerful 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors
7Starlake's AV1000 AI Inference Rugged Server are featuring 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. The main highlight of Ice Lake-SP processors will be support for PCIe Gen 4 and 8-channel DDR4 memory, offer a balanced architecture with built-in acceleration and advanced security capabilities, designed through decades of innovation for the most in-demand workload requirements. The processors are up to 40 cores and an array of frequency and power supports, and deliver up to 40% better performance compared to the previous generations.
2-2. NVIDIA QUADRO RTX6000
AV1000 supports 2 x NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs which are built on the NVIDIA Turing architecture and the NVIDIA RTX platform. With the increasing needs of large AI workloads, the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 passively cooled graphics board features RT Cores and 576 tensor cores for real-time ray tracing, AI, and advanced graphics capabilities which help improving the speed of machine learning applications. Tackle graphics-intensive mixed workloads, complex design, photorealistic renders, and augmented and virtual environments at the edge with NVIDIA Quadro RTX, designed for enterprise data centers to unleash the highest application performance possible on a single server.
2-3. Support 48TB NVMe
NVMe flash offers great benefits for specific AI use cases like training a machine learning model. The datasets of training of a model can be huge; and paging out the old training data and bringing in new data should be done as fast as possible to keep the GPUs from being idle.
NVMe provides low latency and protocol allowing, offers significantly high performance and superior speed. AV1000 is equipped with 1 x PCIe Gen 4.0 x 4, 1 x PCIe Gen 4.0 x 8 to support with 2 x NVMe SSD up to 48TB, which are expected to satisfy to a large extent, the requirements of high speed servers, gaming, graphics and data centers.
More Information: https://7starlake.com/products/gpu-system/liquid-cooled/av1000