Take A Look Inside Dell EMC’s HPC And AI Innovation Lab

Dell EMC’s high-performance computing and artificial intelligence lab in Austin, Texas, is purpose-built to drive innovation aimed at breaking new ground in IT and solving some of the most critical challenges facing businesses today.

The HPC & AI Innovation Lab provides customers and partners access to cutting-edge technology including the latest-generation of Dell EMC products.

“We are an engineering lab that builds solutions for high performance computing and AI,” said Garima Kochhar, a distinguished systems engineer at Dell who helps lead the innovation lab. “That means we take servers, storage, networking and software together to design systems, along with best practices, benchmarking and tuning information for high-performance computing and for AI, machine learning and deep learning workloads.”

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The lab is staffed with computer scientists, engineers and subject matter experts who get early access to new technologies. They integrate and tune systems, benchmark applications and share best practices with customers and partners. Inside the lab, you can conduct cluster comparisons, GPU testing and HPC storage system optimization.

The lab has an extensive collection of processor bins, RAM memory, a full spectrum of server models, and various types of adapters which are available to help in testing and exploring configurations, according to Kochhar.

One of the crown jewels inside the lab is Dell EMC’s supercomputer Zenith. The architecture has consistently been ranked as one of the top 500 supercomputers in the world by the TOP500 project, created in 1993 to improve and rank supercomputing systems around the globe.

“We use [Zenith] for three main purposes: product development at scale, for benchmarking at scale, and also it’s available to customers for access so they can try different technologies in our lab,” said Kochhar.

The Zenith cluster is the result of a collaboration between Dell EMC and Intel. It includes Dell servers and storage, along with Intel’s Scalable Systems Framework that consists of compute, fabric, memory and software.

A key feature to Zenith is its liquid cooling system that uses water to cool the CPUs.

“We have our direct contact liquid cooling solution as part as Zenith. This is a rack of servers that is cooled by water. There’s a heat exchanger at the bottom,” said Kochhar. “We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished with Zenith, but we’ll always continue to innovate it.”