PHYSICS

Dell today presented the Dell Centers for Research Excellence award to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to recognize the important research conducted on its supercomputing cluster. Scientists around the United States will use more than 1,400 Dell PowerEdge™ servers in a high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) called "Tungsten." Research varies from analyzing dangerous weather patterns to better understand and predict severe storms, to simulating large biomolecular systems that can help scientists understand the fundamental processes of the human body and uncover molecular roots of disease. The Tungsten HPCC is the fourth-fastest system ranked on the Top500 list of supercomputers1 and the highest ranked system that is based on industry-standard systems. Installed last fall, a select group of scientists who analyze vast amounts of data using sophisticated applications have been experimenting with codes on the system since January. The Tungsten HPCC will be offered to the larger scientific community in April. Dell President and COO Kevin Rollins was at the University of Illinois to present the award and mark these achievements: "NCSA is conducting important research to help advance critical areas of science and medicine that have profound impacts on society," Rollins said. "We're proud to be the technology provider helping drive NCSA's research. The partnership between Dell and NCSA is a case study in collaboration, execution and excellent results." NCSA Interim Director Rob Pennington concurred. "NCSA and the University of Illinois are honored to receive this award from Dell today. Our close partnership has resulted in a promising new tool for scientists that will help them address the most compelling problems of our time." Other areas of research that the Tungsten HPCC is expected to assist include studies of the evolution, size and structure of the universe and theories on the lifecycle of stars like the sun. Dell's engineering and services organizations have been deeply involved in the design, deployment and ongoing operation of Tungsten. Dell and NCSA collaborated on every aspect of the HPCC, including cluster design, floor plans, electrical requirements and software. At least one Dell staff member is onsite with NCSA every day, and Dell manages ongoing relationships with other NCSA vendors involved in the cluster. NCSA's cluster consists of 1,474 Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers with dual Intel Xeon processors running Red Hat Linux. Other important technology partners for Tungsten include MSTI, Cluster File Systems Inc., Platform Computing, DataDirect Networks, Force10, and Myricom. The cluster computational system has a peak performance of 15.6 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS). NCSA's choice of standards-based HPCC exemplifies the shift in supercomputing from expensive proprietary platforms to flexible standardized technologies. These systems scale easily with increased demand to offer greater availability and performance at low costs, Rollins said. For more information about other Dell Centers for Research Excellence and Dell's HPCC program, please visit: www.dell.com/hpcc.