AUTOMOTIVE

The Expert Centre, which will service the whole of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), will be located at Scali's facilities in Oslo, Norway. Customers, primarily those from scientific and engineering fields, who use HPCCs to simulate designs, analyse phenomena and process large quantities of data will be allotted a team of dedicated experts from Dell and Scali to design their clusters, as well as offer screening and benchmarking expertise to compile a statement of requirement. Steve Smith, HPCC Business Manager for Dell in EMEA commented: "For customers who require proof of concept testing for a particular HPCC solution, the CEC is an excellent first port of call." He continued, "Our collaboration with Scali to provide this facility combines Dell's technical, hardware and Professional Services expertise with Scali's in-depth knowledge of low-latency, high performance system design." The CEC enables customers in EMEA to test different hardware and software components of a HPCC solution to ensure that the cluster will work effectively once it is deployed in a production environment. The standard benchmarks performed and published further help customers to size their clusters accordingly and thereby budget more accurately upfront in terms of the investment they are making. "The CEC is a further proof point of Scali's ability to add value and strengthen the strategic relationship with Dell," says Bjorn Skare, president and CEO of Scali. "Our goal is to help our partners win more deals with Scali's software and services. By leveraging our HPCC solutions and expertise, Dell is able to deliver optimised cluster configurations that are deployed quickly and make financial sense for the customer." Although the CEC has been fully operational and up and running since the beginning of 2004 and is the first dedicated joint Dell/Scali HPCC validation and testing facility in EMEA, Dell has run a similar facility based at its European manufacturing facility in Limerick, Ireland - the Application Solution Centre (ASC) which will continue to offer customer validation and testing services for a wider portfolio of customer requirements. Customers requiring significant HPCC validation and testing services can now leverage resources from Scali, Dell's ASC and Dell's High Performance Clustering Engineering group in Austin as well as utilising local Dell field resources.