Dell has announced advancements to its high performance computing (HPC) portfolio, including the availability of new Dell HPC Systems, early access to innovative HPC technologies, technology partner collaborations, and successful global customer implementations.
“While traditional HPC has been critical to research programs that enable scientific and societal advancement, Dell is mainstreaming these capabilities to support enterprises of all sizes as they seek a competitive advantage in an ever increasing digital world,” said Mak Chin Wah, general manager for Enterprise Solutions, South Asia, Dell.
Dell announced the global availability of the Dell HPC Systems portfolio, a family of HPC and data analytics solutions that combine the flexibility of customized HPC systems with the speed, simplicity and reliability of pre-configured systems. Dell said it has designed and tuned the new systems for specific science, manufacturing and analytics workloads.
The Dell HPC System for Life Sciences is designed to meet the needs of life sciences organizations, this enables bioinformatics and genomics centers to deliver results and identify treatments in clinically relevant timeframes while maintaining compliance and protecting confidential data.
Dell HPC System for Manufacturing enables manufacturing and engineering customers to run complex design simulations, including structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics.
The Dell HPC System for Research enables research centers to quickly develop HPC systems that match the unique needs of a wide variety of workloads, involving complex scientific analysis.
Dell has instituted a customer early access program for early development and testing in preparation for Dell’s next server offering in the HPC solutions portfolio, the Dell PowerEdge C6320p server, which will be available in the second half of 2016, with the Intel Xeon Phi processor (formerly code-named Knights Landing).
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has partnered with Dell and Intel to deploy an upgrade to its Stampede supercomputing cluster with Intel Xeon Phi processors and Intel OPA via Dell’s early access program. Stampede, one of the main clusters for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE),is a multi-use, cyberinfrastructure resource offering large memory, large data transfer, and GPU capabilities for data-intensive, accelerated or visualization computing for thousands of projects ranging from cancer cure research to severe weather modeling.
This month, the National Science Foundation awarded $30 million to TACC to acquire and deploy Stampede 2 as a strategic national resource to provide HPC capabilities for thousands of researchers in the U.S. The new Dell HPC System is expected to deliver a peak performance of up to 18 petaflops, more than twice the system performance of the current Stampede system. Three and a half years since its installation, Stampede ranks as the 12th most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the June 2016 TOP500 list.
Speeding Time-to-Insight with Dell HPC Systems Customers Globally
Meanwhile, the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) this month unveiled Lengau, ranked the no. 1 fastest HPC system in the African continent according to the June 2016 TOP500 list. Powered by 1,039 Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell Storage, Dell Networking and Mellanox FDR InfiniBand, the system is designed to open up new research capabilities and avenues, such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project, and stimulate private-sector projects in areas ranging from climate modelling to energy storage.
“CHPC aims to equip our local researchers with powerful tools,” said Dr. Happy Sithole, Director, Centre for High Performance Computing. “Since we started working with Dell on HPC solutions in 2007, we’ve always taken inspiration from the fastest animals in the land. Our newest system, Lengau, (Cheetah) has a processing speed capable of nearly a petaflops, or a thousand-trillion floating point operations per second.”
Sensus, a utility technology provider, collects data from 17 million gas, electric and water meter sensors, and uses real-time analytics to define, validate and communicate that data in a meaningful way. The company implemented a data cluster based on Dell PowerEdge R730 and R730xd servers with Hadoop, which has enabled a 10x improvement in investigation response time.
“Before, it might have taken us a week or two to process data because we were doing it manually and pooling it from different systems,” said Mike McGann, vice president of quality at Sensus. “Now, our project managers can instantly get a customer’s full data set. Having this data at our fingertips makes us a lot quicker on response time and allows us to provide faster and more accurate results, with defined metrics, to the business, so that we make really good decisions with real data.”