Airbus Deploys 2,016 HP ProLiant Servers in Supercomputing Initiative

While HP has made headlines recently for swapping CEOs, canceling the production of its mobile devices and selling off its leading PC manufacturing unit, a major accomplishment by its server sector flew under the radar.

Last week, Hewlett-Packard announced the major aircraft manufacturer Airbus had doubled its supercomputing power using containerized HP PODs, aka, performance optimized datacenters.
This was quite a feat, creating the 29th biggest computer in the world according to the TOP 500 Supercomputer list.

The project had ben ongoing for the last four years, delivering two HP PODs and becoming the world’s largest industrial HPC system.  The company also noted that this was one of the first confirmed HPC container contracts.

The PODs, delivered to Toulouse, France and Hamburg, Germany Airbus sites, contained servers, storage, networking, software, management and integrated power and cooling.

The server model chosen was the HP ProLiant BL280 G6 blade servers, a whopping 2,016 of them, filling two 12 meter-long containers (that’s about 1,000 square meters of data center space).
HP said in a company press release that its PODs enabled Airbus to “quickly expand data center capacity, boosting computing performance for aircraft development while saving space and energy.”

The PODs are water cooled, which consumes up to 40 percent less power than traditional models.  This allows Airbus to decrease its operating expenses, but also delivers a power capacity greater of more than 15 KW/m(2).

To learn more about trying HP server technology at your institution, contact us at Vernon Computer Source.  With models like the HP ProLiant 330 G6, we allow companies to try out the servers within their existing infrastructure before initiating a final deployment.

Our server rental inventory spans the industry’s top models other than HP, including Dell, IBM and Oracle.