April 6, 2021 — Advanced Clustering Technologies today announced the ACTblade x3XX family of dense HPC systems, which are based on the new third generation of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, code named Ice Lake.
Ice Lake is a significant advancement over the previous generation, offering more cores, more clock, more memory and faster memory. And the new ACTblades offer flexibility with modular components that share a uniform design across all node types.
The new Xeon processors offer a number of improvements over the previous generation, including:
- More cores – up to 40 cores in some SKUs
- 8x channels of DDR4 3200MHz – for optimal performance memory in sets of 16 on a dual socket system (i.e. 256GB, 512GB, etc).
- No reduction of performance when using 16 dimms on boards that support it
- 64 lanes of PCI-e Gen4 per socket (vs 40 lanes of Gen3 on Cascade Lake)
- 2x 512b FMA on all SKUs for increased FP on lower end models
Advanced Clustering Technologies’ ACTblade x3XX series offers flexibility with five node types (compute, management, accelerator, storage and liquid cooled) that slide into housings installed in the rack. All node types share a uniform design as they all use the same motherboard. This allows for consistent firmware and greater manageability. The nodes all feature front I/O designed for optimal cooling and performance. The ACTblade x3XX series includes five system options.
