Super Workstations

Post date: Apr 14, 2017 3:6:57 PM

Our Milestone

24 March 2016 marked a modest milestone for Performance Computing LLP as we completed delivery of the very first workstation we sold.

The customer is using it for neuro research, with a CUDA enabled application.

The Lenovo ThinkStation P700 Workstation delivered is truly a super workstation.  The specifications of the workstation rival the GPU compute nodes of the National Supercomputing Centre here in Singapore.  The build of the P700 is solid, it has optimized cooling and is very quiet.

Workstation Specifications

Just look at the specifications:

Lenovo ThinkStation P700 Workstation

2x Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 2.5 GHz 12 core (total 24 cores)

8x 16 GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM PC4-2133-R (total 128 GB memory)

3x 2 TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.5"

NVIDIA Quadro K420 (DP/DVI) - 1 GB DDR3

NVIDIA Tesla K40C GPU Active Accelerator - 12 GB GDDR5

9 in 1 Media Card Reader

DVD Burner

850 W Power Supply

Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit

Lenovo ThinkVision T2454p 24-inch WUXGA LED Backlit LCD Monitor (IPS)

All these at a very competitive price.  The NVIDIA Tesla K40C can do 1.43 teraflops of peak double precision floating point and 4.29 teraflops of peak single precision floating point.  That is a lot of performance if one can get an application CUDA optimized for this accelerator.

Workstations have come a long way since I was managing a Sun Microsystems Ultra 40 M2 and some IBM IntelliStation Z Pro.

For people who have been in computing for a while it can be difficult to comprehend that this workstation with this many processor cores and 128 GB memory is running Windows desktop.  Microsoft Windows has come a long way since Windows 3.1 and Windows NT 4 Workstation.

I believe that a great majority of Intel or AMD processor workstations sold run Windows, especially those for running ISV applications.  I have observed that here in Singapore a number of workstations with GPU for compute, used in research, run GNU/Linux.

Photographs

Here are the photographs of this lovely Lenovo ThinkStation P700:

Lenovo has released the next generation of their workstation series with updated Intel Xeon processors and NVIDIA graphics cards, including the ThinkStation P710.  For those interested to purchase one of these workstations, feel free to contact Performance Computing LLP.