At OCP Summit 2024, we saw a new HPE server. The HPE ProLiant Compute DL384 Gen12 has two NVIDIA GH200 packages onboard and quite a few uncommon things going on. We found this server at the Arm booth for obvious reasons. It is a NVIDIA Grace Hopper Arm server, which makes it a bit different.
HPE ProLiant DL384 Gen12 NVIDIA GH200 NVL2 Arm Server Shown
Slung on the wall in the Arm booth, we saw the HPE ProLiant DL384 Gen12. This is two Grace Hopper GH200’s in a single system.
Like most NVIDIA MGX servers, almost everything is cabled.
In the center of the chassis, we have our two GH200 modules and a giant heatsink atop one of them.
You can see that it looks like this is one where one of the heatsinks was removed for the show. Here, we can see the NVIDIA Hopper generation GPU and the 72-core Arm Neoverse V2 Grace CPU side.
The back of the system has various risers and MCIO connectors.
Something conspicuously absent is the dual ConnectX-7 module we have seen on most NVL2 platforms.
Here is the rear with up to four power supplies and a number of expansion slots.
The key thing to keep in mind is that the GH200 NVL2 is effectively like connecting two GH200 modules via NVLink in a single system.
Final Words
We were a bit surprised to see so few Arm platforms at OCP Summit 2024, given that hyper-scaler interest in Arm CPUs is very high. Still, this is also a different performance profile to the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 we reviewed. Instead of being low cost per core, this is a high-performance CPU and GPU server.
It was great to see at OCP Summit, but there were a few neat differences between this and other NVL2 machines we have seen.
Actually, in DL384 the GH200 are coupled with NVlink, contrary to other offerings. See the quicksteps at HPE.com
Quickspecs, not quicksteps. Thanks autocorrect
NVL2 means… the two grace hopper superchips are tied together with nvlink. Not 2 systems
NVL72 is different OS images for each Grace, right? I’d assume these are also NVLink between the GPU sides, but they’re two different OSes too? The Grace CPU has the c2c link to the GPU, the GPU has the NVLink to the other GPU. You then need IB or Ethernet to connect the two CPUs directly. Grace doesn’t have that built-in.