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HPC at Dell

Dell HPC Blogs

Recent Blog Posts:

	Cluster Performance: It's not just about Clock Rate Anymore - 07-27-2010 TACC's Dan Stanzione & Tommy Minyard uncover real life application performance gains achieved through Intel's boost in memory bandwidth with its Nehalem arch.
	Dell Partners with the University of Cambridge to Deliver Power of HPC to Researchers - 07-21-2010 Dell VP Troy West introduces the Dell \| Cambridge High Performance Computing (HPC) Solution Centre. This significant new collaboration aims to form EMEA’s leading HPC centre of excellence for all areas of the HPC community, whether academic or commercial.
	CAC: Scientists Leverage Experimental MATLAB Resources Powered by Dell - 06-09-2010 CAC’s Dr. David Lifka describes how researchers are seamlessly scaling desktop MATLAB applications up to a 512-core Dell PowerEdge cluster at Cornell to accelerate data analysis and discovery.
	SciPy Conference Wrap-up & Thoughts - 07-22-2010 Dell's Glen Otero wraps up the SciPy conference with detailed blog post & useful links from the recent SciPy Conference, held at UT Austin's AT&T Conference Center last week.
	HPC Design - Will You be Needing any Processors with your Cluster Today? 07-13-2010 An article in IT Business Edge claims that HPC is the only industry still concerned w/ processing capability & clock speeds. Dell's Blake Gonzales dissects this broad statement & offers some insight into what's important in HPC.

Featured HPC Categories

HPC Compute Covers topics related to the compute portion of an HPC system.	Network/Interconnect From GigE to IB & 10 Gigabit Ethernet, posts here will address HPC interconnect topics.
Storage & File Systems An important aspect of HPC systems, blogs here will cover storage strategies from storage solutions to file systems.	System Administration A roll-up your sleeves & dive-deep series of blog posts that are generally very technical in nature.

Visualization

An important method of creating a visual & graphical output of raw HPC-related data to aid in the interpretation and analysis of complex HPC data sets. Recent Posts:

Visualization in HPC - Seeing is Understanding

TACC Visualization of a breathing lung

Real World Examples of HPC Working to Improve Human Health

HPC at Dell Blogs by Subject & Blogger

Meet the team and follow the individual blogs of subjects that interest you most.
Check out the main Blogs by Subject page.

Dell HPC Blog - Dr. Jeff Layton
Science and Silicon: Smarter Conversations - Dr. Glen Otero
High Performance By Design - Dell HPCC Engineering Team
Large-Scale HPC - Dr. Mark Fernandez
Industrial Strength HPC - Blake Gonzales
HPC for Systems Administrators - Scott Collier
HPC at Dell Guest Blog - Contributions from HPC end users & other technology providers

Recent Chronicle of Blog Posts

HPC Articles & Papers

	STORAGE: Dell & Terascala Metadata Performance
	STORAGE: 'Managing storage is a big challenge'
	STORAGE: Dell & Terascala Turnkey Lustre Performance
	HPC Infrastructure: What you should know about Power & Performance Efficiency
	Visualization: A Practical Guide to Large Tiled Displays
	STORAGE: Dell PowerVault MD 1200 Performance as a NSF

HPC Performance Calculator

Obtain some help in sizing a system's performance using Dell's new HPC Performance Calculator:

HPC, FLOPS, Performance Calculator, Top500

Guest Blogger Posts

TACC: Real World Examples of HPC to Improve Human Health
TACC's Dr. Michael Gonzales outlines some examples of how life scientists, including biologists, physicians, and biochemists, are increasingly using advanced computing to improve human health.

Dell HPC Events & Webinars

Taking Control of the Data Tsunami: 21st Century Storage Best Practices

Listen to this recorded & free webinar today!

Dell XL Consortium

Dell XL is a self-sustained consortium of computing centers that employ large-scale Dell systems. With the participation of Dell and Dell partners, the consortium members meet twice a year to exchange technology information and cooperate on projects to enhance the scalability of cluster computing. Apply to become a member.

HPC at Dell Multimedia Center

PowerEdge C6100 Overview

HPC & Visualization at TACC

HPC & Viz at Penn State University

HPC Events

SciPy 2010 - Python for Scientific Computing Conference in Austin, Texas. June 28-July 3

Past Events

Bio-IT World Expo 2010
SC09 a nd Dell
Dell / HPC
November 2009 Top 500 List
HPC Overview - Podcast

Useful HPC Links

Here are some useful links for HPC-related news sites, blogs, and otherwise useful URLs:

HPCWire (Best general site for HPC news and information)
InsideHPC (Good site for HPC news)
Clustermonkey (Great site for general cluster articles - Dell's own Jeff Layton is one of the authors at this site)
Scalability (The best HPC blog on the Web from Joe Landman)
HPCCommunity (Good site to talk about LSF, OCS 5.x, and Kusu)

You can stay connected with HPC at Dell on Twitter - follow us @HPCatDell.

HPC Overview High Performance Computing (HPC) is a term most commonly associated with the ecosystem of hardware, software, and middleware used to conduct computationally intensive research across distributed memory computer systems. Specialized hardware and software binds many commodity servers together so their aggregate computing power is equal to that of the most powerful. Dell HPC clusters help solve some of the most challenging computationally intensive tasks facing business, educational, and scientific communities. By integrating the latest advances in industry-standard servers, high-speed interconnects, and leading open source and commercial software, Dell's HPC clusters deliver the performance of proprietary SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) systems with the simplicity and value of industry-standard computing. Read more of a detailed Introduction to HPC here.	Power and Cooling Data Center Power and Cooling is another important topic in HPC solutions, because a large number of densely populated servers in a data center can generate a lot of heat and consume a lot of power. HPC solutions tend to be at the extreme end of the range of high density and high performance, which makes an efficient power and cooling design a key component.

HPC Overview

High Performance Computing (HPC) is a term most commonly associated with the ecosystem of hardware, software, and middleware used to conduct computationally intensive research across distributed memory computer systems. Specialized hardware and software binds many commodity servers together so their aggregate computing power is equal to that of the most powerful.

Dell HPC clusters help solve some of the most challenging computationally intensive tasks facing business, educational, and scientific communities. By integrating the latest advances in industry-standard servers, high-speed interconnects, and leading open source and commercial software, Dell's HPC clusters deliver the performance of proprietary SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) systems with the simplicity and value of industry-standard computing. Read more of a detailed Introduction to HPC here.

Power and Cooling

Data Center Power and Cooling is another important topic in HPC solutions, because a large number of densely populated servers in a data center can generate a lot of heat and consume a lot of power. HPC solutions tend to be at the extreme end of the range of high density and high performance, which makes an efficient power and cooling design a key component.

HPC Software Once all of the hardware for a Dell HPC cluster is purchased, deployed, and configured, the next obvious step is deciding "What software do I need to run on the cluster?" There are two software components that are always needed: Applications - Ultimately, this is why the cluster was purchased in the first place. Typically, during deployment and overall cluster qualification, application benchmarks are run to ensure the cluster will meet the customer's needs. Operating System - Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Microsoft Windows CCS. Applications really influence the choice of operating system. If the application runs on Microsoft Windows but not on Linux then the operating system choice is obvious. Once the applications and operating system are chosen, there are many other software components required for an operational cluster and all of these components form the Software Stack. Dell HPC has a nice diagram on the Dell HPC Web site that shows a high-level HPC software stack. The Dell HPC diagram is just an example software stack; other organizations have their own definition of a software stack but in general you need the following layers (in no particular order): Basic cluster services Cluster provisioning Cluster management Cluster monitoring Cluster events & logging Workload management Cluster reporting Cluster file system and/or parallel file system Patching & repository management Development tools Tools and libraries for parallel programming Application and/or grid portals As you can see, these are a lot of components to install and configure. Fortunately, there is movement in the industry to standardize some of the components in the software stack to make it much easier. Intel, Dell, and other partners such as Platform Computing, Ansys, CD-Adapco, The Mathworks, and others are working together on Intel Cluster Ready. The Intel site has this description of Intel Cluster Ready: The Intel® Cluster Ready program and technology package makes it easier to design, build, sell, program, acquire, and deploy clusters built with Intel components. In collaboration with OEMs, channel members, and ISVs, the program specifies a common basis for clusters. This ensures ISV applications written to run on one certified cluster can reliably run on another certified cluster; conversely, a certified cluster will support multiple Intel® Cluster Ready ISV applications.

HPC Software

Once all of the hardware for a Dell HPC cluster is purchased, deployed, and configured, the next obvious step is deciding "What software do I need to run on the cluster?" There are two software components that are always needed:

Applications - Ultimately, this is why the cluster was purchased in the first place. Typically, during deployment and overall cluster qualification, application benchmarks are run to ensure the cluster will meet the customer's needs.

Operating System - Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Microsoft Windows CCS. Applications really influence the choice of operating system. If the application runs on Microsoft Windows but not on Linux then the operating system choice is obvious.

Once the applications and operating system are chosen, there are many other software components required for an operational cluster and all of these components form the Software Stack. Dell HPC has a nice diagram on the Dell HPC Web site that shows a high-level HPC software stack.

The Dell HPC diagram is just an example software stack; other organizations have their own definition of a software stack but in general you need the following layers (in no particular order):

Basic cluster services
Cluster provisioning
Cluster management
Cluster monitoring
Cluster events & logging
Workload management
Cluster reporting
Cluster file system and/or parallel file system
Patching & repository management
Development tools
Tools and libraries for parallel programming
Application and/or grid portals

As you can see, these are a lot of components to install and configure. Fortunately, there is movement in the industry to standardize some of the components in the software stack to make it much easier. Intel, Dell, and other partners such as Platform Computing, Ansys, CD-Adapco, The Mathworks, and others are working together on Intel Cluster Ready.

The Intel site has this description of Intel Cluster Ready:

The Intel® Cluster Ready program and technology package makes it easier to design, build, sell, program, acquire, and deploy clusters built with Intel components. In collaboration with OEMs, channel members, and ISVs, the program specifies a common basis for clusters. This ensures ISV applications written to run on one certified cluster can reliably run on another certified cluster; conversely, a certified cluster will support multiple Intel® Cluster Ready ISV applications.

HPCBrad	Latest page update: made by HPCBrad , Wednesday, 1:33 PM EDT (about this update About This Update Edited by HPCBrad 4 words added 40 words deleted view changes - complete history)
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claytonli

Engagement resource between Dell and ScaleMP

Dec 28 2009, 1:37 AM EST by ShaiF

Thread started: Apr 30 2009, 1:00 AM EDT Watch

Dose there have any Dell solution team can help customer to plan ScaleMP solution?

Thanks!

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Ekorn

Really good overview of HPCC

Jul 11 2007, 12:24 PM EDT by todd_muirhead

Thread started: Jul 10 2007, 2:39 PM EDT Watch

Check ouf this podcast on High performance compute clusters. It features three HPCC experts from Dell: Onur Celebioglu, Engineering Manager; Cydney Stevens, Senior Product Manager; and Kevin Noreen, Senior Manager for HPCC, Virtualization, and Linux Operating Systems.

3 out of 3 found this valuable. Do you?