More computing in a big metal box

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After years of no one wanting (or willing) to talk about their trailer sales, HP now has two releases pretty close together. Maybe this means that there is something here after all. Everyone with a container offering has always said to me that the sales cycles are much longer than systems sales cycles, because a container is more like a datacenter than a system. Maybe that wasn’t just marketing hoohah.

Following close on the heels of the iVEC deployment in Australia, Purdue has announced that it, too, has signed up to put part of its computing resources in a trailer

Purdue LogoKnown for its world-leading research in nanotechnology, structural biology and atmospheric chemistry, Purdue is committed in its strategic plan to doubling current research efforts. To this end, Purdue has been adding server clusters to its data center every summer for the last three years.

Constrained by budget, power and space limitations, Purdue has now turned to the HP POD to deliver a cost-efficient, containerized environment that can be quickly deployed. HP POD also integrates multiple vendors’ hardware into interoperable pools of resources that can be tapped on demand.

By implementing the HP POD, Purdue estimates it can expand its research capabilities by 50 percent within a matter of months for less than one-third the cost of building a new data center. Furthermore, the portability of the HP POD enabled the university to place it in front of a power plant, eliminating the possibility of power transfer and capacity issues.

The system in the trailer is reasonably-sized

To permit Purdue’s faculty to conduct leading-edge research, including modeling climate change and designing next-generation nanoscale electronics, Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing also is building a new supercomputer. “Rossmann” is composed of a 1,000-node HP Cluster Platform 4000 based on HP ProLiant DL165z G7 servers with dual 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processors.