AUTOMOTIVE

SCO:Dell launched its high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) program in February. Please give us an update on how the program has been doing. ROOHOLAMINI: The HPCC program has experienced exponential growth since February – customer inquiries and deployment of solutions on the technology and Dell’s pre-configured HPC clusters have multiplied many times over since the program’s inception. Dell has thousands of PowerEdge servers deployed as nodes in HPCC configurations worldwide. The types of customers that have been initially attracted to the technology are research-intensive industries, such as government, research/higher education, automotive, energy/oil and gas, biotech and more. The compelling reason for the increase in demand for this technology is simple – cost-savings. Customers who could never have afforded a supercomputer can now afford Dell HPC clusters today – and enjoy the built-in ability to expand the cluster as they need to. They also can leverage our over-three-years of experience in designing, delivering and supporting HPC clustered solutions. SCO: Drop a few names for us. Who are some of the corporations or universities running the most complex applications on Dell clusters? What are those applications? ROOHOLAMINI: Sandia National Labs has clustered 172 Dell computers (both servers and workstations) as part of a project to simulate how nuclear weapons will behave in the real world. Sandia’s cluster ranks 103 on the list of the Top 500 largest supercomputers in the world and is built with software that was developed at the labs and integrated with other vendors’ applications. Pennsylvania State University is using its Dell cluster for over 80 different research projects, including: studies on patterns and trends of epidemics of contagious diseases, intervention strategies and control of human diseases and agents of bio-terror, the use of lasers for medical procedures such as LASIK eye surgery, modeling weather patterns and modeling economic theories. Each year approximately 400,000 people in North America alone die of cardiac arrhythmias. The department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Alabama, Birmingham is using its Dell server cluster to research cardiac electrophysiology. The cluster is used for complex mapping and modeling of the heart, its electrical properties and underlying cellular structures. The researchers seek to understand the formation, maintenance and termination of life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias with the goal of improving treatment strategies. Compagnie Générale de Géophysique (CGG) is using a cluster of 500 Dell PowerEdge servers to cut the processing time of seismic data and to provide more accurate images of the Earth’s subsurface – ultimately driving down the cost of oil through improved reservoir management for its clients. The company is also using the cluster to find new oil and gas repositories. With Dell clusters, CGG has increased its global computing power by more than 500 percent. SCO: Since 9/11 national security has been on everyone's minds. You definitely don't need to drop any names on this one, but has Dell won any customers in the defense and intelligence markets? How about the government market overall? ROOHOLAMINI: Well, you are correct, we can’t drop any names, but we can say that the government and the military were among the first industries to recognize the value and cost-savings of this technology. This sector must analyze huge amounts of data everyday in search of trends and patterns – applications where HPCC is most effective. Supercomputing clusters also offer the benefit of being deployed in distributed fashions. Also, in the past, supercomputers were very large and required tremendous environmental changes. Today, a small-medium size HPCC can be deployed in an office environment without much special environmental or power requirements – this is particularly attractive for government and military deployments. SCO: Where is the largest Dell HPCC environment? What is it used for? ROOHOLAMINI: One of the largest deployment of Dell HPC clusters to date is at Compagnie Generale de Geophysique (CGG). The company has deployed 1,512 clustered Dell PowerEdge servers in the US and 500 clustered servers in the UK to perform seismic research for its customers in oil and gas industry. The clusters help CGG map out the most efficient ways for its customers to tap their energy repositories, as well as identify locations of new energy resources. SCO: Any new products coming out of Dell’s Enterprise Systems Group in the near future our readers ought to know about? ROOHOLAMINI: As you may recall, Dell announced that its blade servers will be available this fall. Blade technology is getting a close look for HPC clustering, as it will allow even more density and simplified management for large numbers of clustered servers. Also, Dell just announced the PowerEdge 2650 server. This 2U server will be the foundation of one of the pre-configured HPCC offerings in Dell’s programs, and will offer even more compute power with the latest Intel Xeon processors. SCO: How has Dell's cluster relationship with Cray been going? ROOHOLAMINI: Dell partnership with Cray has been ramping up nicely. We have experienced interest from customers and are looking down the road to some major deployments. We see this as a key vehicle to extending Dell’s ability to further penetrate the High Performance Compute market. Cray is involved with porting ISV applications and optimizing these applications for deployments on Dell clustered hardware solutions. SCO: Is there anything you'd like to add? ROOHOLAMINI: Absolutely. The HPCC program is another key area in which Dell can provide customers with the value of industry-standard technology to achieve better returns on their technology investments, while meeting the performance needs for advanced data analysis and computations. With Dell HPC clusters, customers in research-intensive fields that were once facing up-front multi-million dollar supercomputer investments for systems that they might never fully utilize, can now deploy a low-cost commodity cluster based on PowerEdge servers with the amount of processing power they need today, and the unlimited ability to expand tomorrow, as needed.