Editor’s Pick: Cutting edge components for custom HPC workstations

Custom computer vendor PSSC Labs makes available the latest Intel and AMD CPUs for its line of Axceleron HPC/AI workstations. PSSC Labs, an Ansys certified partner, lists a wide variety of leading manufacturers as well as government agencies and academic research institutions among its clientele. 

PSSC Labs says it builds “technology for visionaries seeking handcrafted computing solutions that will take their work to the next level.” The company claims it offers HPC-class workstations and servers with the lowest total cost of ownership in their class. 

The newest AMD Epyc CPU is the “Milan” generation. It offers scaling from eight to 128 cores, and up to 16 double-precision FLOPS per cycle per core. These come with up to 32 MB of L3 cache per core, and up to 256 MB L3 cache per CPU. The AMD Milan Epyc includes the new AMD Infinity Guard confidential computing application. 

Most models in the Milan line offer at least 1 TFLOPS. The 64-core CPUs provide 2+ TFLOPS. PSSC Labs says it matches the right Milan Epyc to the customers applications, and offers free benchmarking to help select the right CPU/GPU combination. 

The AMD Epyc Milan offers two performance benefits of special interest to design and engineering. The first is faster memory access speeds than previous models; the second is more memory channels and PCI Express 4.0 buses. The company says these two features offer faster access of data to and from processor cores, critical for applications from companies like Metacomp Technologies, Siemens Star CCM and Ansys. 

The newest Intel Xeon processors are from the “Ice Lake” generation. CPUs in this release offer up to 40 “Sunny Cove” generation processing cores, up from 28 in the Cascade Lake generation. There are eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory per socket and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 per socket. This is up from six channels of DDR4 and 48 lanes of PC Gen3 per socket. PSSC Labs says these upgraded specs result in a 48% performance improvement for datacenter workloads and 53% higher average HPC performance. 

“Having eight memory channels is key for memory bound workloads, and with the 40 cores along with AVX-512, the CPU shows great performance for a lot of workloads that are more compute bound,” comments Trish Damkroger, Intel’s VP and GM of HPC. 

PSSC Labs has been assembling all its products at company headquarters in Lake Forest, CA, for more than 25 years. 

“I will continue to recommend PSSC Labs as our HPC provider,” says Michael Acierno, IS/IT manager at Carnegie Institute of Science. “I think there is great benefit to working with a single vendor during the lifetime of a cluster. In the end frustration and costs are usually minimized.”  

Custom workstations, servers and HPC clusters using this latest technology are now available from PSSC Labs here. 

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website. 

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