Enterprise IT major Dell has strengthened its high-performance computing (HPC) presence among the U.S. research organizations.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of California at San Diego, The University of Texas at Austin, University of Florida, Clemson University, University of Wisconsin at Madison and Stanford University are some of the organizations utilizing Dell’s HPC solutions, said Dell in a statement.
Earlier this year, Dell introduced Active Infrastructure for HPC Life Sciences, a converged solution designed specifically for genomics analysis — a growing area of research computing. The new solution integrates computing, storage and networking to reduce lengthy implementation timelines and process up to 37 genomes per day and 259 genomes per week.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Supercomputer
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Leadership Computing Facility – in association with Dell and other technology partners, upgraded its Lustre-based file system Spider to Spider II to quadruple the size and speed of its file system.
It also upgraded the interconnects between Titan and Spider to a new InfiniBand fourteen data rate (FDR) network that can or is designated to be seven times faster and support an I/O rate in excess of one terabyte per second.
This was to boost the productivity of its Titan supercomputer — the fastest computer in America dedicated solely to scientific research — and support its 1,200 users and more than 150 research projects
The University of California, San Diego
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego is deploying Comet, a new virtualized petascale supercomputer designed to address pent-up demand for computing in areas such as social sciences and genomics, areas where there is a growing need for computing capacity for a broader set of researchers.
Funded by a $12 million NSF grant and scheduled to start operations in early 2015, Comet will be a Dell-based cluster featuring next-generation Intel Xeon processors. With peak performance of nearly two petaflops and the firstXSEDE production system to support high-performance virtualization, Comet will be designed to support many modest-scale jobs: each node will be equipped with two processors, 128 gigabytes (GB) of traditional DRAM and 320 GB of flash memory. Comet will also include some large-scale nodes as well as nodes with NVIDIA GPUs to support visualization, molecular dynamic simulations or genome assembly.
The University of Texas at Austin
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin recently announced plans to build Wrangler, a groundbreaking data analysis and management system for the national open science community that will be funded by a $6 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant.
Featuring 20 petabytes of storage on the Dell C8000 platform and using PowerEdge R620 and R720 compute nodes, Wrangler is designed for high-performance access to community data sets. It will support the popular MapReduce software framework and a full ecosystem of analytics for Big Data when completed in January 2015. Wrangler will integrate with TACC’s Stampede supercomputer and through TACC will be extended to NSF Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) resources around the country.
