Thought Leadership

The problems you solve are challenging, both in scope and size. The architecture supporting your workloads should not add complexity. Your IT should "just work."

Dell has been a leader in the simplification and standardization of cluster-based architectures for over a decade. Working with Intel and others, Dell provides production-ready systems for all sizes of operations, markets and workloads, including high performance computing (HPC). Dell HPC clusters and the Intel^® Cluster Ready program deliver powerful solutions for departmental and workgroup computing.

The Intel Cluster Ready program offers an additional level of confidence to cluster-based deployments. Certified Intel Cluster Ready architectures and registered independent software vendor (ISV) applications have been tested together to help assure that both the system and applications will work as expected — out of the box.

Dell is an integral partner in the Intel Cluster Ready program. Leveraging years of Dell cluster engineering experience and expertise, the Intel Cluster Ready program was developed to help further simplify sizing, configuration, deployment, management and maintenance for departmental and workgroup-sized clusters.

Dell builds HPC clusters with best-of-breed options, including interconnections, operating environments and middleware. The combination of Dell HPC clusters with Intel Cluster Ready certifications can further simplify acquisition and deployment with comprehensive testing and integration work, which are done as part of the certification. Your Intel Cluster Ready Dell HPC cluster is "ready to run" with all Intel Cluster Ready-registered applications.

In recent testing, a single Intel Cluster Ready-certified Dell cluster successfully ran 8 different applications from 6 different software vendors without requiring re-configuration or changes to the cluster.
 

Clusters are purpose-built and typically designed to support one or more complex workloads. The goal is to deliver both performance and productivity, allowing your business unit, engineering department and/or lab team to solve complex problems and produce fast results while maintaining cost control. Dell HPC architectures, with Intel Cluster Ready certifications, are designed with this goal in mind. This complete solution is designed to improve time to productivity through a tightly integrated package of certified configurations that have been tested and tuned to run all Intel Cluster Ready registered applications.

An Intel Cluster Ready-certified system is designed to maintain productivity over the life of a deployment. The Intel Cluster Checker tool integrates configuration checks and health monitoring tools in a complete, automated package. Intel Cluster Checker validates configurations and performance both at initial deployment and throughout a system's lifecycle, including scale-out additions. This helps reduce overall costs, including system management, support and the need for specialized services or personnel.

Dell is committed to providing energy-efficient platform architectures. Dell's latest Intel Cluster Ready-certified cluster utilizes PowerEdge™ M600 blade servers, one of the most energy-efficient blade products on the market, with Intel Xeon^® Processors. It is possible to have high performance computing and energy efficiency at the same time.

A system is more than the sum of its parts. The Dell HPC partner ecosystem provides the foundation to deliver complete solutions you can count on. Dell's extended partnerships have also helped lead in the formulation and delivery of the Intel Cluster Ready program. Dell's Intel Cluster Ready partners include the following:

• Clustercorp
• Platform Computing^®
• Red Hat^®
• Panasas^®
• Mellanox^®
• QLogic™
• ANSYS^®
• CD Adapco^®
• ESI Group
• LSTC
• MSC.Software^®
• SIMULIA^®

This growing ecosystem of partners provides leading technologies and best practices, helping to ensure your cluster success.

In just eleven days during 2007, the Stanford University High-Performance Computing (HPC) Center nearly doubled the performance of its existing computing system.

The center leveraged certification methodology from the Intel Cluster Ready Program to fully implement a 1,696-core cluster solution. The solution integrates Clustercorp, Dell and Panasas technologies to give the center the flexibility to meet ever-expanding computational and application requirements and to enable Stanford researchers to achieve faster time-to-results. (Stanford University: Flow Physics and Computational Engineering Case Study)
 

The purpose of high performance computing is to get work done — to aid in analysis and decision making, enhance productivity and deliver results. Time spent deploying, modifying and/or managing an HPC cluster is time taken away from getting results. Dell HPC clusters and the Intel Cluster Ready program help improve "time to results" by providing powerful, tested and certified clusters that are easy to deploy, manage and maintain over the life of the cluster.

To learn more about Dell HPC clusters and Intel Cluster Ready contact your Dell sales representative or e-mail intel_cluster_ready@dell.com. More information about the Intel Cluster Ready specification and Intel Cluster Checker tool is available.

Sample Dell-Certified Intel Cluster Ready Configurations:

• Dell PowerEdge M610/M1000e Blade System with InfiniBand and Clustercorp Rocks+ 5.1
• Dell PowerEdge M610/M1000e Blade System with Gigabit Ethernet and Clustercorp Rocks+ 5.1
• Dell PowerEdge R610 with InfiniBand and Clustercorp Rocks+ 5.1
• Dell PowerEdge R610 with Gigabit Ethernet and Clustercorp Rocks+ 5.1

• Dell PowerEdge R410 with InfiniBand and Platform Cluster Manager
• Dell PowerEdge R410 with Gigabit Ethernet and Platform Cluster Manager
• Dell PowerEdge M610/M1000e Blade System with InfiniBand and Platform Cluster Manager
• Dell PowerEdge M610/M1000e Blade System with Gigabit Ethernet and Platform Cluster Manager
• Dell PowerEdge R610 with InfiniBand and Platform Cluster Manager
• Dell PowerEdge R610 with Gigabit Ethernet and Platform Cluster Manager