Dell is launching new high performance computing (HPC) systems. The company announced the global availability of the Dell HPC Systems portfolio, a family of HPC and data analytics solutions, for life sciences, manufacturing, and research, which can be pre-configured, with a a single point of hardware support and additional service options across the solution lifecycle.
Dell says it will bring HPC capabilities to mainstream enterprises, through a series of solutions and services designed to deliver a range of HPC-as-a-Service capabilities, giving HPC sites a choice of local or remote management services with deployment on-premise, off-premise or a hybrid of the two.
The portfolio includes:
- Dell HPC System for Life Sciences – Can run bioinformatics and genomics applications.
- Dell HPC System for Manufacturing – Can run complex design simulations, including structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics.
- Dell HPC System for Research – Can match a variety of workloads, involving complex scientific analysis.
The systems include the Xeon processor families, support for Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) fabric, and software in the Dell HPC Lustre Storage and Dell HPC NFS Storage solutions.
The University of Texas at Austin has partnered with Dell and Intel to deploy an upgrade to its Stampede supercomputing cluster with Intel Xeon Phi processors and Intel OPA via Dell’s early access program for the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), says Dell. Stampede, one of the main clusters for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), is a multi-use, cyberinfrastructure resource offering large memory, large data transfer, and GPU capabilities for data-intensive, accelerated or visualization computing.
The National Science Foundation awarded $30 million to TACC to acquire and deploy Stampede 2. The Dell HPC System is expected to deliver a peak performance of up to 18 petaflops, more than twice the system performance of the current Stampede system.
Dell has instituted a customer early access program for early development and testing in preparation for the company’s next server offering in the HPC solutions portfolio, the Dell PowerEdge C6320p server, which will be available in the second half of 2016, with the Intel Xeon Phi processor (formerly code-named Knights Landing).
Dell says it will also highlight a proof-of-concept with Cycle Computing soon, demonstrating the orchestration and management of Dell clusters, in a hybrid model sharing on-premise and public cloud resources.