Dell has announced advancements to its high performance computing (HPC) portfolio, including the availability of new Dell HPC Systems, early access to innovative HPC technologies, technology partner collaborations, and successful global customer implementations.
“While traditional HPC has been critical to research programs that enable scientific and societal advancement, Dell is mainstreaming these capabilities to support enterprises of all sizes as they seek a competitive advantage in an ever increasing digital world,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Systems, Cloud and HPC. “As a clear leader in HPC, Dell now offers customers highly flexible, precision built HPC systems for multiple vertical industries based upon years of experience powering the world’s most advanced academic and research institutions. With Dell HPC Systems, our customers can deploy HPC systems more quickly and cost effectively and accelerate their speed of innovation to deliver both breakthroughs and business results.”
Dell announced the global availability of the Dell HPC Systems portfolio, a family of HPC and data analytics solutions that combine the flexibility of customized HPC systems with the speed, simplicity and reliability of pre-configured systems.
Dell engineers and domain experts designed and tuned the new systems for specific science, manufacturing and analytics workloads with fully tested and validated building block systems, backed by a single point of hardware support and additional service options across the solution lifecycle.
Dell continues to bring HPC capabilities to mainstream enterprises through a series of evolving 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.
Speeding Time-to-Insight
The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) this month unveiled Lengau, ranked the no. 1 fastest HPC system in the African continent according to the June 2016 TOP500 list. Powered by 1,039 Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell Storage, Dell Networking and Mellanox FDR InfiniBand, the system is designed to open up new research capabilities and avenues, such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project, and stimulate private-sector projects in areas ranging from climate modelling to energy storage.
“CHPC aims to equip our local researchers with powerful tools,” said Dr. Happy Sithole, Director, Centre for High Performance Computing. “Since we started working with Dell on HPC solutions in 2007, we’ve always taken inspiration from the fastest animals in the land. Our newest system, Lengau, (Cheetah) has a processing speed capable of nearly a petaflops, or a thousand-trillion floating point operations per second.”
Gustave Roussy, a premier European Cancer Center, integrates patient care, research and teaching to establish more individualized and less invasive cancer treatments. Since deploying its Dell HPC system, the hospital is now able to analyze genes more quickly to make informed decisions around personalized medicine. “Today, more than ever, we need state of the art technology to analyze genomes quickly to be able to determine the best treatments for a patient as soon as possible,” said Dr. Daniel Gautheret, Gustave Roussy. “It used to take us more than 30 hours to analyze a single patient sample. With our Dell HPC solution, we now can analyze 96 samples in less than a day. This is very encouraging as it enables faster time-to-treatment, and better results for our patients.”
Sensus, a utility technology provider, collects data from 17 million gas, electric and water meter sensors, and uses real-time analytics to define, validate and communicate that data in a meaningful way. The company implemented a data cluster based on Dell PowerEdge R730 and R730xd servers with Hadoop, which has enabled a 10x improvement in investigation response time.
“Before, it might have taken us a week or two to process data because we were doing it manually and pooling it from different systems,” said Mike McGann, vice president of quality at Sensus. “Now, our project managers can instantly get a customer’s full data set. Having this data at our fingertips makes us a lot quicker on response time and allows us to provide faster and more accurate results, with defined metrics, to the business, so that we make really good decisions with real data.”
