HP’s latest answer to scale-out, which it interprets as clouds, grids, compute farms, Web 2.0 and HPC, is the BL2x220c G5, which it says is the world’s first two-in-one server, offering the highest compute density in the industry or more than three times the density of traditional 1U rack-mounts. HP doesn’t want to rent out its cloud; it wants to be the equipment under other people’s clouds.

The gismo puts two independent servers in a single blade enclosure to double performance and reduce real estate requirements. That means 32 server nodes per enclosure, each capable of supporting two quad-core Xeons (or alternately dual-cores) and up to 16 GB of DDR2 RAM.

Altogether that works out to 1,024 cores, 128 servers and two terabytes of RAM in a 42U rack or 12.3 teraflops per rack.

The widgetry comes standard with two gigabit Ethernet ports per node with options to use 10 Gbit Ethernet or Infiniband.

HP figures it delivers 60% better performance per watt than Dell configurations and minimizes cooling and power costs.

Pricing starts at $6,349.

It’s pairing the thing with its multi-petabyte ExDS9100 Extreme Data Storage System.