Dell Higher Education Solutions: High Performance Computing

Dell offers your school cost-effective research computing solutions

In today's climate of shrinking budgets and cautious funding for academic and scientific research, a computing investment must pay off in terms of both scalability and performance. After all, the success of any research program is measured by its ability to access information in a timely manner. Dell builds research computing solutions with this in mind.

Research computing (also referred to as "high performance computing") makes use of powerful computing tools and processes to generate data for advanced scholarly investigations. With a Dell high performance computer cluster (HPCC), your school can enjoy the speed and power of an expensive supercomputer at a fraction of the cost and with less risk of prolonged downtime.

By using the latest standards-based technology, Dell's HPCC solutions offer institutions and researchers robust solutions at a great value. Find out how Dell and the University of Texas at Austin have joined forces on a supercomputing clusters project to benchmark HPCC performance.

What is a high performance computing cluster?

Traditionally, high performance computing (HPC) has been the domain of supercomputers. These solutions were difficult to install, maintain and use and were typically limited to research communities. They ran on expensive proprietary software that only the researchers themselves knew how to use. As a result, users not only had to be experts in their field of scientific research, they also had to maintain an advanced knowledge of computer science.

A high performance computing cluster (HPCC) is a powerful and economical solution for enhancing your research environments. An HPCC is a group of commercial off-the-shelf computers interlinked via high-speed interconnects to create a robust, high-speed computing resource that rivals the performance of traditional mainframe supercomputers at a fraction of the cost.

In a typical HPCC, the interlinked computers work concurrently to complete a request by dividing the work among the server nodes, reassembling the results and presenting them to the client as a single output. A cutting-edge solution to the challenging data-driven research tasks common to academic environments, an HPCC handles both numeric- and data-intensive applications.

Putting Dell's technology to work for you

In the past, researchers have needed expensive supercomputers with proprietary software to conduct their work. Large technology investments can have a substantial impact on a school's research budget, diverting funding away from the research itself. Dell provides an ideal solution for both individual researchers and larger institutions. With an HPCC, your college or university can enjoy significant price-performance advantages and highly flexible management solutions ideal for the critical needs of today's educational research environments. A Dell HPCC allows you to:

Most importantly, Dell HPCC solutions offer the benefits of scalability—a critical asset in your long-term plan. Scalability means your IT systems can grow with your needs.

Stretching your research dollars

Many research projects on campuses today require high performance research computing solutions. The ability of a computing solution to perform billions of operations per second facilitates important advances in academic research. Unfortunately, high performance computing has traditionally required expensive and proprietary supercomputers that can be difficult and costly to install, maintain and use.

Researchers have come to rely on grants to subsidize the expensive research tools necessary to their work. Dell's high performance computing solutions can help you get more for your grant dollars. By choosing research technology that offers the same results at a lower cost, researchers can benefit from smaller grants or purchase more computing power with larger grants.

Addressing the need

Today's data-rich academic research projects require powerful and reliable high performance research computing solutions. In response to this need, IT personnel must:

Determine how they can design and implement a scalable solution Understand how much data will be analyzed Foresee any implementation problems and find solutions Determine how to optimize, maintain and support systems to ensure maximum availability

The HPCC solution

When applying for a grant for academic and scientific research funding, you must demonstrate that your computing investment will pay off in terms of performance. The success of that investment will be measured by your solution's ability to access information in a timely manner. Dell builds its research computing solutions with these demands in mind.

Dell high performance computing clusters (HPCC) are extremely affordable and widely available to a broad range of academic institutions. With cluster configurations, colleges and universities can provide more students with hands-on experience by giving them the opportunity to take part in ground-breaking research. They can also enjoy significant price-performance benefits and highly flexible management solutions ideal for the critical needs of today's educational research environments. These benefits include:

Implementation at your own pace Low costs on hardware and software Long system lifetime Low costs by managing the environment Short procurement cycles Recycling of outdated nodes Low total cost of ownership (TCO)

HPCCs are ideal for meeting your institution's most challenging research computing needs. Research areas as diverse and fundamental as meteorological modeling, automotive crash test simulations, human genome mapping and nuclear blast modeling benefit from HPCC technology.

The HPCC advantage

As the scope and complexity of computational needs continue to increase at colleges and universities, IT managers and administrators are compelled to seek appropriate and affordable solutions. A high performance computing cluster (HPCC) provides the computing power and speed necessary to keep schools on the leading edge in today's high-profile, competitive market.

While increased performance and reduced cost are sufficiently compelling reasons for upgrading your school's computing center with a Dell HPCC, there are additional benefits and features that make HPCC solutions preferable to larger Symmetric Multi-Processors (SMPs). The table below compares features of both configurations and demonstrates why HPCCs are a logical answer to your need for high computational capabilities at low cost.

Feature	Large SMPs	HPCC
Scalability	Fixed	Unbounded
Availability	High	High
Ease of Technology Refresh	Difficult	Manageable
Application Porting	None	Required
Operating System Porting	Difficult	None
Service and Support	Expensive	Affordable
Standards vs. Proprietary	Proprietary	Standards
Vendor Lock-in	Required	None
System Manageability	Custom; good usability	Standard; fair usability
Application Availability	High	Moderate
Reusability of Components	Low	High
Disaster Recovery Ability	Weak	Strong
Installation	Non-standard	Standard