The Value of High-Performance Computing

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 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.

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 through 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.

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.

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:

1. Implement at your own pace.
2. Save money on hardware and software.
3. Extend your system's life.
4. Reduce costs through a managed environment.
5. Shorten procurement cycles.
6. Recycle outdated nodes.
7. Decrease your total cost of ownership (TCO).

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 multiprocessors (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.