Supermicro FatTwin™ Power Savings
IntroductionT

he Supermicro FatTwin™ is the latest addition to Supermicro’s evolving
line of Twin server solutions. The FatTwin™ greatly expands compute andstorage capacities beyond Supermicro’s existing 2U Twin²® and 2U Twin
SuperServer® systems to achieve increased performance with lower power
consumption. The FatTwin™ was designed to realize extremely low PUE in data
centers and significantly reduce electric power costs even in free-air cooled
environments. Due to its shared components the FatTwin™ improves reliabilityand TCO, while its modular design greatly increases its configurability,serviceability and maintainability.
The FatTwin™ is available in high-density 8/4/2 hot-plug system nodeconfigurations with a choice of memory capacities, number of hard disk
drives, front or rear I/O, PCI and networking options, and 1280W and 1620W
Platinum Level power supplies. These many options allow the FatTwin™
to be optimized for customer-specific environments. For example, highperformance applications requiring 16 DIMMs and high-power CPUs can be
fully supported with the FatTwin™ model utilizing fully redundant 1620W
power supplies, while competitive systems do not have this capability. The
FatTwin’s high-efficiency, highly effective shared cooling architecture allows
it to operate in high-temperature, free-air cooled environments up to 47°C,
providing considerable cost savings and improved TCO. The FatTwin™ offers
versatile configurations and high-temperature support with cost, power,
and space savings, effectively targeting Data Centers, Cloud Computing,and HPC; Engineering, Research, and GPU projects; File and Storage Server
deployments, and General Server and Enterprise Server applications.

Supermicro FatTwin™
SYS-F617R3-FT

Supermicro 2U Twin2®
SYS-6027TR-HTRF+

The reference system used in this study was a competitor’s 2U 4-node server
H2312WPJR. The system is integrated with four server board units, supporting
up to twelve 3.5” hot-swap SATA hard drives, with redundant power supplies.
The power utilization of the Supermicro FatTwin™, 2U Twin²®, and H2312WPJR
systems were measured under identical operating conditions andconfigurations, utilizing the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark.
Continuous power measurements of idle, average, and peak power values
were recorded via power meters. From the measurement results, theSupermicro FatTwin™ and 2U Twin²® power savings were calculated.

Page 1©2012 Super Micro Computer, Inc.

Competitor’s System
H2312WPJR

September 2012 Rev 2.0

Configuration

Analysis

In this study, two Supermicro systems were reviewed, a 4U 8-NodeFatTwin™ with Front I/O (SYS-F617R3-FT) and a 2U Twin²® (SYS-6027TRHTRF+). Both the systems were tested with redundant 1620 watt Platinum
Level (94%) and 1280 watt Platinum Level (95%) digital power supplies
respectively. The competitive system reviewed was the H2312WPJR, a2U 4-node Twin system with redundant 1200 watt Platinum Level power
supplies.

The peak and average power levels of each system were compared undermaximum LINPACK loading. These power levels were then converted topower savings in dollars using a cost of $0.10 USD per kilowatt-hour forelectric power cost. By using the H2312WPJR result as the baseline, thesavings for each Supermicro system configuration was then calculatedfor a four-year estimated lifetime, under the assumption of PUE=1.5. The
power and cost saving results are summarized in Figure 3 below.

These systems and configurations are outlined in Figure 1. The numberof nodes (4 nodes) used, the components (including CPUs, memory, andSSD), the BIOS settings, and the test environments were identical for all
the testing.
SystemConfiguration

Supermicro
F617R3-FT(1280W)

Supermicro
F617R3-FT(1620W)

SupermicroSupermicro(1280W)(1620W)

6027TR-HTRF+ 6027TR-HTRF+H2312WPJR(1200W)

Processor/node2x Intel® Xeon® E5-2630 2.30GHz 6-Cores TDP 95W

Memory/node

8x Hynix 16GB DDR3-1600 2Rx4 ECC REG 1.50V

Storage/node

1x Intel SSD 320 Series 300GB SATA 2.5” 3Gb/s

PowerSupplies

2x 1280W

2x 1620W

2x 1280W

HyperThreading

EnabledTurbo Mode

Disabled

C-States

Enabled2x 1620W

2x 1200W

SupermicroSupermicro
6027TR-HTRF+ 6027TR-HTRF+(1280W)(1620W)Per NodeSupermicro
F617R3-FT(1280W)

Supermicro
F617R3-FT(1620W)

PeakPower

224W

226W

235W

237W

259W

Peak Power
Savings

52.5W

49.5W

36.75W

33.75W

0W$ Savings(4 yrs.)

$184

$173

$129

$118

$0

AveragePower222W

223W

233W

234W

254W

AveragePowerSavings

48.75W

47.25W

32.63W

30.75W

0W$ Savings(4 yrs.)

$171

$166

$114

$108

$0

H2312WPJR(1200W)

Figure 3: Supermicro FatTwin™ power and cost savings per Node

The Supermicro FatTwin™ Front I/O configuration with a 1280 watt power supply
performed the best, with a $184 cost savings per node over the competitor
H2312WPJR system at peak power.

Figure 1: Hardware and software configurations

The systems were tested in a 220 volt power environment and with a room temperatureof 21°C. The operating system used was Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 update 4 (64 bit).

Results
All systems were run utilizing HPL. Power usage for each system wascontinuously monitored during each test run by power meters. The
result is displayed in Figure 2 below. Due to the identical configurations
all systems generated a performance of 204 GFLOPS per node utilizing a
LINPACK problem size of 125,000.

Figure 2: Power usage with running HPL – High Performance LINPACK(4 Nodes)

Conclusions
By virtue of shared power and cooling components, the Supermicro
Twin server improves cost-effectiveness, power efficiency andreliability. The new FatTwin™ modular architecture design not only
maximizes the I/O capacities but also makes the system highly
flexible to configure and exceptionally easy to maintain.
Supermicro optimizes FatTwin’s thermal airflow via innovative
chassis mechanical architecture. Advanced circuit designs formotherboard and power distribution with redundant Platinum
Level high-efficiency (95%) digital switching power supplies
allow the system to deliver by far the highest energy efficiencies
without sacrificing system performance. The FatTwin™ is designed
to operate within an extended ambient temperature range (0°C
to 47°C), ideal in free-air cooled environments, to help further
reduce energy consumption and reliance on costly traditional airconditioning.
Based on this study, the Supermicro FatTwin™ and 2U Twin²®
outperform a competitor’s comparable 2U 4-node server systemin terms of power efficiency. The power cost savings of theSupermicro FatTwin™ and 2U Twin²® during a 4-year server lifetime
is substantial: the front I/O FatTwin™ configuration saves $184 pernode followed by the 2U Twin²® at $129 per node at peak power,
or $171 and $114 per-node savings respectively at average power.
For customers deploying thousands of these Supermicro systems intheir data centers, the savings are clearly significant.

w w w. s u p er micro. co m/Fat Tw in
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September 2012 Rev 2.0