slot expanders

IBM Flex System PCIe Expansion Node The IBM® Flex System™ PCIe Expansion Node provides the ability to attach additional PCI Express cards, such as High IOPS SSD adapters, fabric mezzanine cards, and next-generation graphics processing units (GPU), to supported IBM Flex System compute nodes. This capability is ideal for many applications that require high performance I/O, special telecommunications network interfaces, or hardware acceleration using a PCI Express GPU card. The PCIe Expansion Node supports up to four PCIe adapters and two additional Flex System I/O expansion adapters.

The PCIe Expansion Node has the following features:

Support for up to four standard PCIe 2.0 adapters:

- Two PCIe 2.0 x16 slots that support full-length, full-height adapters (1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x adapters supported)
- Two PCIe 2.0 x8 slots that support low-profile adapters (1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x adapters supported)
- Support for PCIe 3.0 adapters by operating them in PCIe 2.0 mode
- Support for one full-length, full-height double-wide adapter (consuming the space of the two full-length, full-height adapter slots)
- Support for PCIe cards with higher power requirements

The Expansion Node provides two auxiliary power connections, up to 75W each for a total of 150W of additional power using standard 2x3, +12V six-pin power connectors. These connectors are placed on the base planar so that they both can provide power to a single adapter card (up to 225W), or to two adapters (up to 150W each). Power cables are used to connect from these connectors to the PCIe adapters and are included with the PCIe Expansion Node.

Two Flex System I/O expansion connectors

The I/O expansion connectors are labeled I/O expansion 3 connector and I/O expansion 4 connector in Figure 2. These I/O connectors expand the I/O capability of the attached compute node.