Dell HPC Innovation Lab: Democratizing HPC

The #highperformancecomputing requirements in many businesses are exploding. Across varied industries, the growing use of increasingly sophisticated simulation and modeling algorithms and #bigdata analytics for smarter, faster decision-making are overwhelming IT infrastructures. What many companies are finding is that they need compute, storage, and networking capabilities that are on a par with those commonly found in the largest academic supercomputing centers and government labs. Unfortunately, there are many challenges in bringing this technology into the enterprise. This is something the #DellHPC Innovation Lab is trying to address. HPC for Enterprise While HPC has been critical to scientific research, #DellEMC is trying to mainstream its use to support enterprises of all sizes as they seek a competitive advantage in an ever increasing digital world. The Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab’s goal is to commercialize the benefits of advanced processing, network, and storage technologies, as well as enable open standards across the industry. “We want to make it simpler and easier to design and operate HPC systems,” said Onur Celebioglu, HPC Engineering Director at Dell. To that end, the 13,000 square-foot facility (containing over 1000 servers of different form factors and generations) is a focal point for Dell EMC’s joint R&D activities with partners and system integrators, as well as with customers. Work focuses on research, development, and integration of HPC solutions. Dell EMC uses the HPC Innovation Lab to evaluate emerging HPC technologies and to find ways to incorporate them into Dell EMC solutions Knowing that businesses must take economics into account when deploying HPC solutions, the Dell HPC Innovation Lab generates best practices to help customers get the biggest bang for the buck. The staff includes engineers with diverse technical backgrounds including computer science, mechanical engineering, and bioinformatics. “We are developing best practices and exploring how to get the most performance out of a system,” Celebioglu said. For instance, the lab is looking at things including how BIOS settings impact performance and can be adjusted to fine-tune system performance. As part of the overall efforts, the Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab builds optimized systems that simplify HPC system design process. And since every organization’s workloads can have very different characteristics, the lab does performance and scalability studies in collaboration with partners and customers.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/03/20/dell-hpc-innovation-lab-democratizing-hpc/