ENGINEERING

NEW YORK - Dell today recognized The Cornell University with a Dell Centers for Research Excellence award during the opening of the Cornell Theory Center's (CTC) new solutions center in Manhattan. The award is part of an initiative by Dell to acknowledge exceptional use of the company's high-performance computing clusters (HPCC) for groundbreaking commercial research and projects that can benefit society. These clusters link large numbers of standards-based servers and storage systems together to act as a single resource to solve complex computational problems. "CTC is receiving this award due to their groundbreaking research and for their pioneering role in the use of clustering technology," said Michael Dell, CEO of Dell. "CTC's research could ultimately save lives through scientific breakthroughs and help advance a standards-based approach to supercomputing for many more organizations." CTC is using Dell supercomputer clusters to model the potential impact of tsunami waves on coastal communities; create "fingerprints" for bacteria to assist in tracking outbreaks of food-borne diseases; develop highly efficient methods for computing risk factors affecting large, complex financial portfolios; and to model, study and ultimately prevent failures in machine parts that lead to aviation disasters. As one of the earliest adopters of Dell HPCC, CTC has also led and participated in the development process of clustering platforms from Dell, Intel and Microsoft and shared its experiences with various research, government and industry organizations. Computer scientists at CTC also were instrumental in developing the first HPCC tools for Microsoft Windows environments. "We are truly honored to receive this award," said Hunter L. Rawlings III, president of Cornell University. "Cornell has a longstanding reputation as one of the world's premier learning and research institution, as well as a tradition of collaboration with industry and government - our technology has been instrumental in this reputation. With our Dell high-performance computing clusters we have led breakthroughs in the social sciences, introduced biologists to an entirely new class of computational tools, as well as developed new analytic methods for financial markets, driving the transition from art to science." CTC has multiple clusters of Dell PowerEdge servers that use Intel Pentium, Xeon and Itanium processors running Microsoft Windows Server software. The center has plans to double the size and aggregate capacity of its 425-node Dell cluster within the next six months. For more information about Dell Centers for Research Excellence or Dell HPCC programs, visit www.dell.com/hpcc.