Within the CAPE project, two hardware platforms supporting our concept of “Composable Infrastructure for scalable Edge Servers” are developed: The embedded High-Performance Server (eHPS) and the Embedded Micro Data Center (EMDC). Both hardware platforms are based on COM-HPC, an established form factor for embedded modular computing (Figure 1).
This article highlights the features of the eHPS platform, jointly developed by Bielefeld University, Christmann informationstechnik+medien GmbH and paraXent GmbH (Figure 2).
The eHPS platform targets
- High performance Edge Computing applications with a power budget of 500 W (single server) – 5 kW (small cluster)
- Heterogeneous computing leveraging hardware accelerators like GPUs and FPGAs
- Applications with high-bandwidth and low-latency requirements demanding PCIe Gen6
- Widely available air-cooled 19” rack server housings (E-ATX form factor)
The main features of the eHPS are
- Support for three modular compute modules
- 1x COM-HPC Server Type D+E
- 1x COM-HPC Client Type A+B+C
- 1x COM-HPC Client Type A+B
- Support for heterogeneous computing and hardware acceleration (GPU, FPGA)
- Flexible PCIe Gen6 -based Communication Infrastructure
- Switched PCIe for high-speed interconnection between nodes, enabling host-to-host communication
- Direct coupling of other eHPS in the same rack/data center using 4x PCIe Gen 6 via MCIO
- 3 PCIe Expansion slots for additional accelerators or Network Interface Cards (NIC)
- 10 GbE per compute module (direct connect)
- Board management via BMC
- One centralized BMC to control and monitor all compute nodes
- Web-based UI or Redfish interface for remote control
- 1GbE Out-of-Band (OoB) interconnect per compute module
