TYAN, the most famous builder of server, workstation and high-performance computing solutions is trumpeting today its “new” flexBLADE Technical Workgroup Computing Platform.

The flexBLADE is a standalone server-in-a-can, it’s also an AMD Opteron-based solution targeted at - basically - anything that moves. Tyan says technical workgroups, R&D and SMB customers all the way to the top of the pyramid: High-Performance computing.

In this box, third generation Opterons are stacked two by two into the five-level ark, and can be configured as cluster, SMP, small-server farm or a mix. Enterprises are also invited to rack ‘em up and create their own flexible high-performance server. That’s quite a lot of power in such a smallish cabinet (14”x17”x30”).

Each blade comes with a dual (quad core supported) socket board, although you can “scale up” by linking the blades via the backplane HyperTransport link. Each board also sports 16 DIMM slots, two 2.5-inch HDDs (onboard), PCIe x16 slot et al. This means you can also stick a very high end GPU on it and create a multi-monitor powerhouse.

The cabinet itself includes a KVM switch, swappable HDD, PSU, fans and switch. It will also allow your flexBLADE to network at up to 20 Gigabit InfiniBand, 10 or 1 Gigabit Ethernet.

Funny enough, we thought we’d seen this design already, back in November ’07 at the Super Computer Conference in Reno? Shurely not. µ