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Dhahran, Saudi Arabia -- Saudi Aramco Deploys Dell's Largest High-performance Cluster Solution in Europe, Middle East and Africa -- Dell has installed its largest high performance computing cluster in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) to date, at Saudi Aramco, the world's leading oil producer/exporter and a top producer of natural gas, to provide standards based high-performance computing clusters (HPCC) in order to accelerate its oil and gas exploration program. HPCC links hundreds to thousands of standards-based servers together to act as a single, powerful compute engine. By using off-the shelf, standardized components, Dell customers can expand, or "scale out," their clusters easily to respond to increased demand in a cost effective manner. Dell was awarded the contract to build and implement the second cluster phase at Saudi Aramco's EXPED Computing Center to cope with processing the ever-increasing tide of seismic data. The supercomputing cluster in phase two comprises 910 Dell PowerEdge servers, adding 1,820 Intel Pentium III processors to Saudi Aramco's compute engine. Dell implemented Scali Manage(tm) from Scali AS to ensure that the 910 servers could be managed from a central point with maximum efficiency and reliability. Processing the seismic data allows geophysicists and geologists to more accurately assess where new reserves of oil and gas may be situated and is a critical tool for Saudi Aramco's exploration. Exploration for an oil strike can require up to thirty crews to be on standby at a high daily cost. The implementation of the Dell cluster resulted in a positive oil strike in only two weeks, as opposed to four weeks with their legacy proprietary system, providing an immediate return on investment for Saudi Aramco. "We initially installed a 32-node cluster last year and saw the cost benefits immediately; we recently worked with Dell to add a further 910 nodes," commented Mohammad Huwaidi Saudi Aramco's Exploration Systems Analyst. "Using standards-based systems from suppliers such as Dell enables us to build the fastest yet least expensive Prestack Time Migration (PSTM) system. Our ability to rapidly and inexpensively add computing power to our cluster is one of the major benefits of the Intel platform," Huwaidi continued. "The Saudi Aramco installation demonstrates that global customers are using standards-based technologies to 'fulfill' their most challenging computing requirements," said Walid Moneimne, vice president, Enterprise Systems Group, Dell EMEA. "The performance and price benefits in scale-out environments for applications previously conducted on expensive proprietary systems, have made supercomputing increasingly accessible to the mainstream market. A Dell HPCC solution leveraging high-performance clustering software, such as Scali Manage, can deliver the same results as a proprietary system for as much as a tenth of the cost."