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E4 Computer Engineering  has announced the launch of a new series to add to its wide product portfolio, the CARMA cluster series powered by SECO.

The E4 CARMA cluster series powered by SECO offers a range of low-power, low-energy appliances designed to appeal to the HPC world thanks to the pairing of a heterogeneous ARM+GPU (NVIDIA Tegra 3 + Quadro GPU). In fact, with the present generation of ARM CPUs it is not possible to address algorithm based on Floating Points arithmetic, therefore most of scientific application are excluded. CUDA enabled Quadro GPU broadens the range of applications that can be addressed and gives huge boost to performance.

While ARM products are still currently limited by the 32-bit support, early adopters and developers need to start working on real systems to assess the capabilities of these high energy efficient solutions.

Leveraging the wide market adoption of the NVIDIA Tegra platform in the mobile space, E4 and SECO have delivered a real, cost effective and competitive server solution with immediate availability. The series is aimed to seismic processing, signal and image processing, video analytics, traffic analysis and many other applications. The range has two main platforms able to host carrier boards for Qseven modules, the CARMA microcluster and the CARMA cluster. The CARMA microcluster comes in a 5U form factor and contains up to 8 CARMA blades and 1 management node (x86 based) while the
CARMA cluster is a 3U appliance containing up to 12 CARMA2 blades (high density blades, each CARMA2 blades contains 2 CARMA nodes for a gross total of 2 ARM CPUs + 2 Quadro 1000) or 12 DARMA blades (4 ARM CPUs per blade). DARMA and CARMA2 can be mixed into the same chassis.

Also, all blades comply with Qseven standard, so the MB contains only I/O devices while the CPU component can be selected from a wide range of SoC options, in order to ensure a smooth and progressive transition from the x86 platform into the ARM environment. Qseven technology provides the highest flexibility while decreasing engineering costs, in fact the CPU architecture can be swappedre-using the same carrier board without any modification.

Launching the product at SC12 in Salt Lake City at the ARM’s stand (booth #122), E4 Computer Engineering is confident that the CARMA CLUSTER series powered by SECO will easily represent exciting news for the HPC community aiming to achieve great performance results with much less power consumption involved. “We felt an immediate connection with SECO in terms of experimentation and innovation,- said Simone Tinti, HPC Team Leader of E4 Computer Engineering- the CARMA DEV kit on which our series is based has proved to be one of the most interesting devices to create low power, low-energy high performance appliances which will be welcomed by all HPC users.”