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ROUND ROCK, Texas - Oxford University's world-renowned physics department will implement a Dell high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) solution to conduct research that will assist in a project aimed to unravel the secrets of the universe. The cluster of Dell PowerEdge (tm) servers will analyze and store data used to investigate mass, inertia and antimatter, thereby helping to understand the behavior and effects of elementary particles on the universe. The Dell HPCC solution at Oxford University will provide computing power and data storage to a larger study being jointly conducted at Oxford, Liverpool, UCL and Glasgow universities. It will combine the particles research with proton research and analysis from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois, USA. Project leader at Oxford, Dr Todd Huffman decided to install clustering technology in 2002 when the Consortium(1) received £340,000 additional funding. He commented, "The Dell solution will help us to simplify the enormous task we have ahead of us by providing the power of a traditional proprietary supercomputer but at a fraction of the implementation and management cost." Better scalability, processing power and flexibility The project needed to update its computing platform with a solution that provided maximum performance and flexibility with the greatest achievable cost-savings. "The Dell solution gives us the option to expand and upgrade our infrastructure by adding new processors and storage devices year-by-year when our existing hardware is at capacity," says Huffman. "Dell also presented the best overall package, offering up to 30 percent more processing power than its competitors for the same cost, which meant we could implement the solution while keeping within the budget." Martin Boyce, general manager, Dell Enterprise Business Systems, explains, "Many of the world's leading organizations, universities and research institutions are realizing the value and performance benefits of standards-based technology for applications previously conducted on expensive proprietary systems. HPCC is an ideal solution for the Oxford University project, as it has the processing power to churn and analyze large amounts of data at much better value than closed-architecture supercomputers." About the Oxford Cluster The cluster is running Red Hat Linux on ten 2650 PowerEdge servers, 16 PowerVault 220s RAID storage enclosures providing 7TB of useable RAID storage. In addition, a Gigabit Ethernet network and Scali Universe XE cluster management software were installed. Support was also an important factor for Oxford so a three-year support contract with Scali, one of Dell's leading clustering technology partners, was put in place. This guaranteed support enables the team to focus on its research, and not on maintaining the clustered computing infrastructure. Dell's relationship with Scali was another contributing factor in the decision to go with Dell because of the company's reputation in the industry. (1) Oxford is the lead institution in a consortium of 4 Universities, including Liverpool, UCL (University College London), and Glasgow. Dell has sold four separate clusters, one for each site. Each site has an identical cluster, and accesses data from FermiLab in US to carry out their research.