GPU compute platforms are trendy these days and the Gigabyte G181-H44 is a 1U GPU compute platform that is looking to make a statement. The company’s new 1U offering is designed to house four NVIDIA Tesla PCIe GPUs (or other accelerators) in 1U. For those who are looking for an ultra-dense compute platform, this is among the densest.
Gigabyte G191-H44 Specs
The Gigabyte G191-H44 utilizes dual Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs. Each CPU has a full complement of 12x DDR4 DIMM slots and will support Intel Optane Persistent Memory when the Cascade Lake-SP generation arrives with that capability.
There are four PCIe 3.0 x16 ports for the GPUs. Two are assigned to each CPU. This facilitates CPU and RAM to GPU bandwidth which is missing from many single-root PCIe switch designs.
One can see that there are two PCIe x16 slots for 100GbE or EDR Infiniband. Two 1GbE ports are for provisioning and management. There are also four 2.5″ bays. Two bays are hot-swap capable from the front of the chassis. Two are internal and less serviceable so they are best suited for SSDs.
There are some GPU applications where the name of the game is cramming as many GPUs into a box as possible. Many HPC oriented designs emphasize bandwidth from the host to the accelerator and therefore these types of designs with more PCIe lanes directly attached to the CPUs are desirable.
We were slightly surprised to see that the server does not have M.2 drive slots onboard. This is common to see for boot devices and cache devices. As we saw in our Gigabyte H261-Z60 Server Review Gigabyte has been emphasizing M.2 even in their high-density CPU compute servers.
Learn More About the Gigabyte G191-H44
You can learn more about the system on the Gigabyte website.
It looks like that Gigabyte is making the right products. The G291-Z20 is also quit impressive.