The FLEX chassis was designed specifically to meet the challenge of incorporating four double-width FPGA cards – this means providing not only the space and suitable mounting mechanisms, but also enough cooling capacity and enough power for the FPGAs and the host system. Over our standard chassis, we had to include an additional bank of fans, and an entire second PSU. Our chassis are designed in-house and fabricated locally in the UK. We’ve spent a lot of time incrementally improving our chassis design over the years, often implementing client requirements such as additional sensors, more form factors, and adjustable fan brackets.
Overclocking naturally increases the power requirements for a server, and with ever-increasing core counts and architecture complexity, the importance of having a correctly specified power supply has never been more important. Add in the requirement to power four FPGA cards, and it clearly becomes a challenge. Blackcore has a custom-designed 2000W redundant PSU that's used in our typical systems. The FLEX system employs two of these PSUs, one powering the host system (i.e. motherboard, CPU, liquid-cooling system) and the second powering the FPGA and FPGA cooling system.
Blackcore’s custom-built liquid cooling solution is engineered with premium components from trusted partners — rigorously tested for long-term reliability. Combined with our overclocking expertise, this setup enables exceptional performance at sustained all-core turbo speeds, all while staying within safe thermal limits to ensure system longevity.
Blackcore utilizes eight high powered fans in a push-pull configuration split over the water-cooling radiator in two banks, mounted at the front of the chassis. The first bank of fans provides optimal cooling for the liquid passing through the radiator – this however creates a high degree of pressure drop which the second bank then counteracts, ensuring a high level of airflow continues throughout the system and ensuring adequate cooling is provided to network cards at the rear of the chassis. A typical measurement shows about 3,700 LFM of airflow from the rear of the chassis. The FLEX system specifically incorporates an additional bank of fans directly in front of the FPGA cards to provide maximum airflow through the dense heatsinks on a typical card. Blackcore also incorporates many additional custom cooling components like VRM and DIMM coolers to ensure optimal performance under high load.
This also allows for an additional Single Width card to be installed, like a SmartNIC or PPS fan-out.
Intel’s latest HEDT workstation CPU, the top-of-the-range Intel® Xeon® w9-3595X comes as part of the Sapphire Rapids Refresh range and offers a larger core count of 60 cores. Features 112 Gen5 PCIe lanes, so all FPGAs can run at full bandwidth.
Up to 1TB of non-overclocked, or 768GB of overclocked DDR5 ECC RDIMM.
As FPGA use becomes increasingly synonymous with electronic trading, in both pure and hybrid environments, we had many clients looking to utilize FPGA in more unique ways. Multi-FPGA and head-less FPGA were requests that kept coming up. So, we created a new range and got designing.
Our systems utilize the best components from the leading technology companies in the industry.
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