Dell Technologies Expands HPC Line

ROUND ROCK, Texas — Dell Technologies is going after the high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) markets in a big way via several recent releases.

This includes upgrades to the Dell PowerEdge server portfolio, Dell APEX High Performance Computing as-a-Service offerings, Dell Quantum Computing Solution for hybrid quantum computing, and Dell Validated Design for HPC, according to the company last month.

Several additions to the Dell PowerEdge server lineup have been created in collaboration with Intel and NVIDIA to include smart cooling technology. This facilitates much denser compute without overheating when being used for AI model training, HPC modeling and simulation, core-to-edge inferencing, and data visualization.

Additions to PowerEdge server line

• PowerEdge XE9680 server: with eight NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs or NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in an air-cooled design. It also contains two 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
• PowerEdge XE9640 server: 2U with Intel Xeon and 4 Intel Data Center GPU Max Series processors, plus direct liquid cooling to reduce energy cost with greater rack density.
• PowerEdge XE8640 server: Air-cooled 4U with four NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA NVLink technology, plus two 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors designed to develop, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models to accelerate and automate analysis.

Dell APEX as a service

Over the last few years, HPC has transitioned from a small subset of the compute space into a dominant driver of growth.

For many years, HPC was the province of massive and extremely expensive supercomputers hosted in vast government laboratories. But that is changing courtesy of the latest generation of processors and GPUs.

As well as using the latest Dell servers for HPC, Dell APEX High Performance Computing offers another avenue to make HPC capabilities attainable by a larger slice of the market.

This time, those organizations wishing to run large-scale, compute-intensive HPC workloads can do so without the burden of deploying, managing, and maintaining their own servers and supporting infrastructure. Dell APEX is a fully managed, subscription-based as-a-service experience aimed especially at life sciences and manufacturing workloads.

Those subscribing to this service over one, three, or five years receive everything needed to run HPC workloads, including an HPC cluster manager, a container orchestrator, workload manager, and underlying HPC-optimized hardware configurations.

Dell Quantum Computing Solution

For those enterprises keen to introduce emerging quantum technologies more easily into existing infrastructure, the Dell Quantum Computing Solution enables businesses to develop algorithmic approaches to complex use cases and accelerate chemistry and materials simulation, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning.

The solution uses a Dell quantum simulator built on PowerEdge servers. It is integrated with the Qiskit Dell Runtime and IonQ Aria software to allow quantum workloads to run with on-premises or cloud-based quantum acceleration.

Dell Validated Design for HPC

Finally, Dell Validated Design for HPC enables businesses to run risk assessments of data-intensive simulations on HPC systems, including GPU-accelerated Dell PowerEdge servers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and NVIDIA Bright Cluster Manager software.

It can review large volumes of historical and real-time data to analyze risk and return. Financial services institutions, for example, gain optimal configurations for system performance and efficiency that are validated and tuned for that specific use.

“Advanced computing”

“As compute innovation accelerates to keep pace with demand, customers are looking to upgrade their IT environments and harness advanced computing capabilities to speed discovery and insights,” said Rajesh Pohani, VP of portfolio and product management for PowerEdge, HPC and Core Compute at Dell Technologies.

“New Dell Technologies servers and solutions give businesses of all sizes access to technologies once only accessible for the world’s largest research institutions and government agencies, allowing them to tackle HPC, ease AI adoption and propel their businesses forward.”

Accelerated compute technology helps companies “get all the value they can from the massive amounts of data they generate on a daily basis,” said Peter Rutten, research VP, worldwide infrastructure practice, IDC.

“Dell Technologies is seizing the opportunity with new accelerated Dell PowerEdge servers and solutions that can help customers tackle demanding performance intensive computing workloads,” Rutten said.

Dell’s Recent Activity

Dell Technologies has a strong presence in both the consumer and business markets. But it is pulling out all the stops in the business compute space of late. As well as these recent HPC announcements, it has doubled down on security in recent months.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager software advancements along with a new appliance were released to help customers improve operational security and heighten cyber resiliency.

For those in the cloud, Dell introduced isolated cyber vaults for Google Cloud to broaden its cyber recovery capability in public cloud environments. Dell APEX Data Storage Services, too, has added flexible backup storage as-a-service offerings to its portfolio.

On the multicloud data protection front, Dell has released several solutions to accelerate adoption of zero-trust principles with built-in capabilities for operational security. And to help assure its customer base that it has their back, Dell has introduced a Cyber Recovery Guarantee.

Growth of the HPC Market

IDC notes how the HPC market is industrializing or democratizing.

“Adoption is no longer limited to well-funded national laboratories, universities, and select industries, such as oil and gas, genomics, finance, aerospace, chemical, or pharmaceutical,” Rutten said.

“HPC is gaining wider adoption in public and private research institutions, cloud, digital, and communications service providers and — crucially — at many enterprises. This is revolutionizing business investments and outcomes.”

As a result, IDC predicts that by 2025, a fifth of all worldwide computing infrastructure will be used for running AI and other HPC workloads. No wonder Dell is pushing hard into this space with a lineup of servers that provide HPC at a more affordable price point.

See more: High Performance Computing Market Report