The partnership means that customers will benefit from the joint expertise that a combined Dell and Scali can bring to the table ranging from cluster planning, on-site system installation, application & system porting and tuning to training and performance benchmarking and management with Scali software. This brings together Dell's management processes with the seamless integration of Scali technical expertise and provides the customer with a single point of contact. The offering enables organisations to enhance efficiencies and maximise the value of their HPCC investment. "Customers typically face the challenge of defining and identifying their needs. Organisations often don't have the expertise in house to get a system up and running and performing at an optimum. After a solution has been deployed it needs to be maintained and later the organisation may need various kinds of consultancy services. Our partnership with Scali is a direct response to the HPCC needs of our customers and we have delivered a best of breed solution", said Okkie Esterhuizen, Director Dell Professional Services, Dell, EMEA. "By teaming with Scali and Dell, customers gain instant access to some of the most experienced and well-trained HPCC engineers and consultants in the industry. Together, we are able to deliver highly cost effective solutions with optimised performance", said Bjorn Skare, President and CEO of Scali. "Our focus has been to provide the lifecycle services, integrated software and technical expertise needed to deliver high performance systems that will continue to scale with customer requirements," Skare added. The DPS partnership extends the relationship between Dell and Scali in EMEA that was first formalised in November, 2001. Under the terms of the DPS partnership the companies have already jointly delivered efficiencies to a number of customers across EMEA, including The Society for Scientific Data Processing LTD in Goettinge, Germany (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbh Goettingen). Dell and Scali Proven Track Record Dell and Scali implemented an HPCC solution for The Society for Scientific Data Processing LTD (GWDG) in Goettingen, Germany. The solution comprised 54 Dell PowerEdgeTM 2650 servers powered by dual 3.06 GHz Intel® XEONT processors with 4Gb of memory per node. The software provided by Scali incorporated Scali MPI ConnectT, an interconnect-independent MPI layer (Message Passing Interface) to enable high performance communication between the compute nodes, and Scali ManageT, a cross-platform cluster management tool, which enables the distribution of applications to the processors, and provides a single point of manageability for the cluster. This cluster is ranked in the Top 500 supercomputers list at 407 Gflops. Commenting on the deployment Professor Hartmut Koke, representative Managing Director of GWDG explained that, "Universities have to allocate their limited budgets very carefully; this means that we weren't able to call on our own manpower to set up and implement such a demanding cluster solution. We preferred to leave this to those that have the necessary know-how and experience to do it for us. Dell was able to provide us with all of this in a very professional way. The cooperation between Dell and Scali to set up and implement this high performance cluster has been extremely successful."