INDUSTRY

ROUND ROCK, Texas - Dell announced, today, that it has signed agreements with several high-profile customers in Europe to provide high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) solutions. The new customers include leading names from the academic, automotive, petroleum, and aerospace industries. HPCC links tens 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 their clusters easily with new technologies to meet increased demand. These significant deployments further highlight Dell's growing visibility in the high performance computing (HPC) market, in which according to IDC's recently published fourth quarter High Performance Technical Computer QView report, the company has made significant gains in the overall market based on the strength of its Intel-based HPCC offerings. Dell now currently ranks number one in the Intel- based technical cluster market and number four in the HPC market overall(1). "HPCC is an excellent example of how customers are leveraging industry standard hardware to conduct advanced computing projects," said Walid Moneimne, vice president, Enterprise Systems Group and Services, Dell EMEA. "More and more organizations and institutions are realizing the performance and price benefits of standards-based technology for their sophisticated applications, and we are leading the way ensuring that supercomputing is accessible to the mainstream market." In the latest Top 500 list of supercomputers (Nov. 2002), nine of Dell's clusters are listed with four of them featuring in the top one hundred. The highest-ranking cluster, placed at number twenty-two, is based at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York in the US. A Degree of Clustering Oxford University, the lead university in a consortium of four - Oxford, UCL (University College London), Glasgow and Liverpool - has recently purchased four, ten-node clusters for Particle Physics Research as part of the global research into the CDF (Collider Detector Facility) experiments going on at Fermilab near Illinois, in the US. "Cost is always a challenge because an organization like ours is reliant primarily on external funding," says Dr. Todd Huffman from Oxford. "Dell's HPCC solution met our performance requirements perfectly at a low cost." University College Cork (UCC), Ireland's leading research institution, also recently purchased a HPCC solution. The solution, which was manufactured at Dell's European Manufacturing Facility in Limerick, consists of 50 Dell PowerEdge 1655MC modular servers, each with two processors and 1GB RAM. It will be used in the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics, a new centre funded by the Higher Education Authority involving the School of Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Computer Science. The cluster will be used by researchers and will also be connected to Grid-Ireland. Dr. John Morrison, Department of Computer Science, University College Cork, commented, "This solution has enabled us to enter the realms of high-performance computing in terms of processing power at a fraction of the cost. Ultimately this will enable research to take place at UCC, which might not otherwise have happened. Performance, value and the high quality of pre-sales support were key factors for consideration when awarding the contract to Dell." Dell Sets Oil and Gas Industry Alight Compagnie Generale de Geophysique (CGG), a leading supplier of services and products to the worldwide oil and gas industry, is in the process of further expanding its capacity for HPCC at its Foxboro Centre, UK facilities. As a leading supplier of services and products to the worldwide oil and gas industry, CGG has deployed 512 clustered PowerEdge servers running Red Hat Linux in the United Kingdom to process data in finding new oil fields around the world. Flying High with HPCC A 96-node Dell cluster was recently added to an existing HPCC solution at MTU Aero Engines (Germany's leading engine manufacturer) in Munich, Germany. MTU Aero Engines is a strong national and international player in the development, manufacture and repair of commercial and military engines. The servers were added to a cluster of 64 Dell PowerEdge servers that was installed at MTU Aero Engines in 2001. This SuSE-based HPC solution is used to simulate the aerodynamics of jet engines. The interconnect is based on a Myrinet network. MTU decided to extend the cluster based on the very positive experience with Dell and SuSE in this area, citing best price and performance, high availability, flexibility and scalability as the key criteria for the expansion. "The porting of our Unix software to Linux was no problem at all," said Dr. Axel Philipp, project leader of the MTU team. "With the aid of the Dell experts it was easy to integrate the Linux clusters with our heterogeneous server infrastructure. The high-end Linux cluster is highly reliable and stable. The downtime so far is zero." Sparking off Improved Efficiency Additionally, Cray Italy and Dell have installed 16 clustered PowerEdge 2650 servers into Enel, the Italian electricity and energy company. The cluster will be used at the Research Department to run Fluent, a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) application, that will model different plant components aimed at making efficient use of a variety of fuels and reducing emissions to the lowest possible levels. Mr. Barbucci from Enel Research commented, "Dell was able to quickly accommodate our individual requirements and has provided us with a solution that has a very good price and performance ratio." Driving HPCC Forward Further recent customer purchases come from within the automotive sector, where Dell and Cray Germany have signed an agreement to provide computing clusters for TRW Automotive. Additionally, Fiat Research, Italy is using several Dell HPC clusters running Linux. "Customers like these show how we can continually provide sophisticated technology at a price-for-performance level unequalled in the industry," states Dell's Moneimne. "We are pleased to be a part of all the exciting research being conducted by our customers on high-performance Dell clusters, and excited that more research can now be accomplished affordably." About Clustering Clustering provides the ability to combine multiple systems with shared storage to deliver services a single system could not. Clustering can be used to achieve higher performance, availability, scalability or simpler management. For more information please visit: www.dell.com/clustering. High-performance computing clusters (HPCC) combine multiple Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) computer systems together with high-speed interconnects to achieve the raw-computing power of classic "big-iron" supercomputers. HPCC systems work to complete a single request by dividing the work among the compute nodes, reassemble the results and present them to the client as if a single-system did the work. About Dell (1) Source: IDC High Performance Technical Computer Oview, March, 2003