ENGINEERING

New Dell blades, servers, storage platforms and workstations are designed to increase performance and efficiency in HPC environments

Scientists and engineers are looking for innovative ways to accelerate applications and shorten computational cycles. Dell is helping them by strengthening its portfolio of PowerEdge servers, storage expansion platforms and integrated solutions designed to meet the demands of the most compute intensive environments in education, government and industry, including the energy, financial services and life sciences sectors.

Innovation Meeting Customer Needs

To help customers deploy complex data subsystems, and workstations that put incredible computational power into a user's hands, Dell continues to invest heavily in and support innovative high performance computing (HPC) technologies that include GPGPU (General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units) acceleration solutions, and storage offerings.

These new Dell HPC solutions include:

-- The PowerEdge C6105, a 2U, 4-system solution where each system is a 2-socket AMD-based server that delivers a low TCO and high power efficiency for scaled out applications in a maximum-density chassis. The C6105 features hot-swap server nodes and hard disk drives along with redundant power supplies making it ideal for energy and budget constrained scale-out environments.

-- The PowerEdge C410x, an external PCI Express (PCIe) expansion chassis that connects 1-8 host nodes to 1-16 PCIe devices to get results fast, while saving on space, weight and cost. The system does not have CPUs or memory but is designed for efficiently powering and cooling GPUs and other PCIe devices. External PCIe chassis provide more flexibility and density while saving power and reducing costs compared to internal server GPUs. -- On the measure of single-precision floating point performance, a PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis loaded with 16 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPU modules delivers up to 16.5 Teraflops of computing throughput.

-- The PowerEdge M610x, bringing a new set of capabilities to Dell's blade portfolio providing customers database acceleration and expanded compute capabilities by integrating two x16 PCIe slots in a dense 2S blade form factor. Customers can take advantage of NVIDIA's new Tesla class GPUs or Fusion-IO's ioDrive Duo drives.

-- Dell is also offering the new high performance Tesla(TM) C2050 GPU computing processor on the Dell Precision T7500 workstation, transforming it into a personal super computer for general purpose scientific and engineering computing. The Dell Precision T7500 along with the Tesla C2050 provides an ideal platform for oil & gas, financial, life sciences, academic and governmental organizations running compute intensive CUDA applications.

-- Partner technologies and innovations, such as Platform Computing Cluster Manager 2.0.1, Dell Edition, which allows users to quickly deploy, run and manage heterogeneous Linux clusters with ease. In addition, Dell is working with Terascala to introduce standardized storage platforms, targeted for customers utilizing Lustre file systems.

Availability and Integration

All Dell HPC solutions have been tested and validated so users can trust that the solution is not just a sum of parts but a tightly integrated, ready-to-run platform. The newly validated solution stack including, Platform Cluster Manager, HPC Storage Solution, C2050 with the Precision C7500 workstations, PowerEdge C410x and M610x servers are available immediately while the C6105 will begin shipping in the near future.

Enabling Research

This portfolio will support academic institutions like the University of Colorado at Boulder and The University of Kentucky as well as public and private sector research organizations committed to increasing HPC efficiency in order to conduct ground breaking research. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder are using Dell HPC solutions to study areas of earth-system science, biotechnology and renewable energy while at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation, studies are aimed at simulation modeling and data analysis to explore, understand and predict climate change.