HPE Cray Supercomputing EX vs Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650
Side-by-side specifications from the vendors' own documents. The HPE Cray Supercomputing EX is a liquid-cooled, blade-based supercomputer platform sold as the EX4000 cabinet or the smaller EX2500 rack. The Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 is a direct water-cooled dual-socket compute tray designed for extreme HPC clusters and supercomputers.
| HPE Cray Supercomputing EX | Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 | |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | HPE | Lenovo |
| Status | current | end-of-sale |
| Released | — | Jun 2018 |
| Form factor | Liquid-cooled cabinet (EX4000) or rack (EX2500) | dense node |
| Cabinets | EX4000 liquid-cooled cabinet; EX2500 liquid-cooled rack that can also hold some air-cooled hardware | — |
| Compute chassis | 8 per EX4000 (64 compute blade slots); up to 3 per EX2500 (24 compute blade slots) | — |
| Chassis slots | 8 compute blade slots and 8 HPE Slingshot switch blade slots per chassis | — |
| Compute blades | EX4252 and EX4252 Gen 2: four 2-socket AMD EPYC nodes per blade (Genoa up to 96 cores, Bergamo up to 128, Turin Dense up to 160 or 192). EX254n: two 4-socket NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper nodes per blade | — |
| Interconnect | HPE Slingshot switch blades, 64 ports at 200 Gb/s, dragonfly topology; 200 Gb/s Slingshot or 100 Gb/s Ethernet mezzanine NICs | — |
| Cooling | Direct liquid cooling to cold plates through a cooling distribution unit; no fans in the cabinet | — |
| Power supply | 15 kW rectifiers: up to 32 per EX4000 cabinet (4 shelves), up to 12 per EX2500 rack (3 shelves) | Shared power delivered through the water-cooled enclosure backplane |
| Processor | — | Up to 2x 1st or 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors up to 28 cores each (up to 205W TDP) |
| Memory | — | 16x DDR4 DIMM slots supporting up to 1TB DDR4-2933 ECC RDIMM |
| Drive bays | — | Up to 2x 2.5-inch non-hot-swap SATA/NVMe SSDs or 2x internal M.2 boot SSDs |
| Expansion slots | — | 1x PCIe 3.0 x16 slot for high-speed fabric adapter (InfiniBand EDR / Omni-Path) |
| Network | — | Integrated Intel or Mellanox mezzanine adapter supporting 100Gb/s fabrics |
| Management | — | Lenovo XClarity Controller (XCC) |
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