Latest Dell Hardware Targets Cloud And HPC

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Dell has made its next step into the high performance computing (HPC) space with a range of new hardware offerings, including the AMD-based PowerEdge C6105, a rack-mount server aimed at such compute-intensive environments as high performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing.

The server is part of Dell’s C-series systems that the company introduced in March, designed specifically with HPC and cloud in mind. Speaking at the Supercomputing conference in Texas in 2008, Dell CEO Michael Dell told the audience that his company was committed to growing its presence in the HPC space.

Low Cost HPC For The Cloud

Dell officials said it is important for the company to start becoming more vocal about its HPC offerings, said Tim Carroll, senior manager for business development for Dell’s HPC unit. It is an important business for Dell, and could be increasingly lucrative. According to Carroll, Dell estimates that between 15 to 20 percent of processors sold go into the technical computing environment.

The system, powered by AMD’s Opteron 4000 series processors, illustrates Dell’s approach to the highly-virtualised, hyper-scale computing space, according to Donnie Bell, senior manager of HPC solutions at Dell. The company is looking to work more collaboratively with customers like Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to determine what users need in their environments, rather than just creating a box that is rolled out onto the market.

It is also a high-performance computer that is affordable and manageable, Dell said. This is aimed at giving any institution the possibility of buying into HPC to allow access for researchers and businesses that might not have had the chance to use such powerful systems in the past, a market that Dell calls the Missing Middle.

“It was all about the elite,” Bell said in an interview with eWEEK. “So we needed to find a way to bring it to the masses.”

Enterprise market

Not only are research institutions looking to take advantage of such servers but also enterprises that are now showing interest in systems that enable them to take advantage of the growing cloud computing trend. Like HPC, cloud computing requires systems that can handle high levels of data.

The 2U (3.5 inch) C6105, which is similar to Dell’s PowerEdge C6100 running Intel processors, includes four two-socket motherboards. Each socket can handle chips with up to six cores.

To help reduce the space and power demands, some changes were made to the C6105 that are not seen in its traditional rack servers. These included eliminating the embedded LifeCycle Controller remote system management feature and giving the four motherboards shared power and cooling capabilities. In Dell’s regular racks, each motherboard has its own power and cooling components.

Dell is also taking advantage of the trend toward greater use of graphics cards in the HPC space. A growing number of businesses and research institutions are beginning to use GPUs for more general-purpose computing jobs to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities.

Dell’s new PowerEdge C410x external PCIe (PCI Express) expansion chassis can connect the C6105 servers to as many as 16 PCIe devices, including Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs.

Other HPC-targeted offerings include the PowerEdge M610x blade and the Precision T7500 workstation, which also is powered by Nvidia Tesla 2050 GPUs. Dell is also partnering with Platform Computing to create the Cluster Manager 2.0.1, Dell Edition, which enables users to quickly deploy and manage heterogeneous Linux clusters more easily.