Continuing our coverage at GTC 2024, we have a cool blade on the show floor from HPE Cray. The HPE Cray EX254n sports up to eight NVIDIA Grace Hopper modules in a single and very heavy blade.
8x NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips in a Blade HPE Cray EX254n at GTC 2024
When it comes to AI, where lower-precision compute dominates, today NVIDIA is king. When it comes to HPC, HPE is building the big exascale supercomputers for FP64 compute. At GTC 2024, we saw the interesting melding of both into a blade for the HPE Cray EX platform.
The HPE Cray EX254n is the company’s liquid-cooled GPU blade. It houses eight NVIDIA Grace Hopper modules, each with a 72-core Arm Neoverse V2 CPU, LPDDR memory, and a Hopper GPU. Those eight Grace Hopper modules are split into two four-module carrier boards, and then the node uses Slingshot 11 with four injection ports per node.
If the overall format looks familiar, these are the same blade formats powering the US Department of Energy’s first public exascale supercomputers. They fit in the HPE Cray EX4000 and EX2500 platforms for example so they are liquid cooled. Here is another HPE Cray EX420 blade from ISC 2023 that you can see a similar outer blade format and heavy use of liquid cooling.
At GTC 2024, the company showed off its Spaceborne Computer 2 project that just launched.
The company also had a fun mini 2U server model with NVIDIA GPUs that was metal and palm-sized.
It seems like that would take a long time with a steady hand and tweezers to put together.
Final Words
It is always fun seeing the HPE Cray EX blades and Grace Hopper sounds like it has a decent following given it is a 1kW and under part, but an architecture that scales to Grace Blackwell. Hopefully we see a GB200 version soon from HPE Cray. It would have been nice, however, to see the HPE Cray XD670 8x NVIDIA H100/ H200 box, but you can also see the OEM version of that machine on the GTC show floor in a different booth. It was great to see another Arm server from HPE. We previously reviewed the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 Ampere Altra Max Arm server for much lower power installations.
