Now that IDC estimates more than a third of organizations with high-performance computing infrastructure buy their hardware from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the vendor is moving to press its advantage with the addition of two new machines to its lineup. The first is the Apollo 6500, a beefy 4U server that can be loaded with as many as 8 of Nvidia Inc.’s latest-generation graphical processing units.

A single GPU may have upwards of thousands of cores that are each able to perform calculations independently, a property that lends itself well to deep learning algorithms.  As a result, HPE says that artificial intelligence software can run considerably faster on the Apollo 6500 than on traditional servers that only include general-purpose Intel Xeon CPUs. Furthermore, the company claims that the machine is equally well-equipped to handle complex scientific simulations and business intelligence applications that are tasked with visualizing large amounts of data.

Such workloads can not only benefit from the high core count of GPUs but are also able to exploit the specialized optimizations that Nvidia incorporates into its silicon to speed up the processing of graphical assets. A recently-funded startup called MapD Technologies Inc. claims have taken advantage of the technology in its database to let Verizon Communications Inc., an early client, improve the responsiveness of some internal visualizations by up to 50 times. But however central, horsepower is only one of the many considerations that an organization must weigh when implementing its high-performance computing infrastructure.

Equally important is the ability to cost-effectively store the massive volumes of information that are involved in creating an artificial intelligence or simulation, which is where the other new machine that HPE is rolling out today comes into play. The Apollo 4520 is a dual-node server designed to run Lustre, the open-source filesystem of choice for high-performance computing environments. HPE hopes to set the box apart from the other appliances in the category by enabling customers to use the vanilla version of the software instead of pre-installing a commercial distribution like the competition does. For added measure, the company has also included a failover feature that automatically springs into action if a storage drive fails.

The Apollo 4520 will be available for purchase later this month starting at $8500, while the Apollo 6500 is set to begin shipping sometime in the next quarter. HPE presumably plans to disclose pricing for the latter system around the same time. 

Image via Nvidia