81920 CPU Cores per Rack with AMD EPYC Venice at HPE Discover 2026
5 hours ago
- #HPE Cray
- #High-Performance Computing
- #AMD EPYC Venice
- HPE showcased the Cray GX5000 nodes and next-gen AMD EPYC 'Venice' sleds at HPE Discover.
- The HPE Cray GX250a Compute Blade houses 8x AMD EPYC Venice CPUs, totaling 81,920 cores per rack.
- The blade features liquid-cooling with hot/cool mating points, power busbars, and side cables/tubes.
- Some nodes included Samsung E1.S EDSSF SSDs on CPU coldplates for local fast scratch storage.
- Memory is liquid-cooled in standard DIMM form factors, possibly MRDIMMs.
- Slingshot 400 NICs are on side pods, with future Slingshot 800 compatibility; connectors resemble OCP NIC 3.0.
- A CDU capable of cooling 1.6MW was displayed, and the system appears to be a working node, not just a demo.
- The design supports high-density computing, aiming for roughly 10x the density of current air-cooled racks.
- Core count calculations suggest 81,920 cores per rack based on 40U, with 2U allocated for other components.