5 New Dell HPC Products For AI, Storage, PowerSwitch And PowerEdge

Dell Technologies unleashed several new products around high-performance computing (HPC) including a new 400-GbE switch and expanding its artificial intelligence portfolio with new reference architectures.

Dell Doubles Down On High Performance Computing

Dell Technologies launched a slew of new high-performance computing (HPC) innovation at Supercomputing 2019 this week, including a 400-GbE switch and new NVIDIA and Intel options for its PowerEdge server line.

“There’s a lot of value in the data that organizations collect, and HPC and AI are helping organizations get the most out of this data,” said Thierry Pellegrino, vice president of HPC at Dell Technologies in a statement. “We’re committed to building solutions that simplify the use and deployment of these technologies for organizations of all sizes and at all stages of deployment.”

The greater adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is spurring growth across the HPC industry. According to a report from Hyperion Research, the global high-performance computing industry is expected to grow by 7.1 percent annually, exceeding $39 billion by 2023. Additionally, HPC-server based AI is expected to rise more than 29 percent from 2018 to 2023, reaching $2.7 billion by 2023.

Here are five new Dell Technologies HPC products the Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure giant launched this week at the Supercomputing 2019 conference this week in Denver.

New 400-GbE PowerSwitch

The company unveiled its new Dell EMC PowerSwitch Z9332F-ON this week. The 400-GbE open network switch is designed for high performance workloads. The PowerSwitch Z9332F-ON is purpose-built for cloud service provider data center networks with intensive compute and storage traffic such as HPC, AI and streaming video.

The new switch also delivers four times the throughput, double the price performance and near double the power efficiency of existing 100GbE platforms. Dell said the PowerSwitch Z9332F-ON is delivering on the company’s promise of software-defined networking, making network operations more flexible, programmable and easier to manage.

The PowerSwitch Z9332F-ON is now globally available for channel partners to sell.

New NVIDIA And Intel Options For Dell Servers

Dell EMC DSS 8440 Server: Dell Technologies introduced the NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs as a new accelerator option for the Dell EMC DSS 8440 server. With up to 16 accelerators, this offers high capacity, high performance machine learning inference with energy efficiency at 70-watts per GPU. This solution is designed for multi-tenancy environments that need to share machine learning resources among users or departments.

PowerEdge Servers With NVIDIA: Dell has created new GPU and Intel FPGA support for its PowerEdge servers including NVIDIA Tesla V100S GPU with up to 25 percent more bandwidth to communicate with Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect and PowerEdge Express Flash NVMe Performance PCIe SSDs for faster data transfers. NVIDIA RTX GPUs is also now supporting PowerEdge servers in order to boost performance at a fraction of the cost, space and power requirements.

PowerEdge Servers With Intel FPGA: Dell unveiled that Intel’s FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card D5005 in Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd and R940xa servers aimed to boost inferencing, streaming analytics, video transcoding, and financial and genomic applications.

All of the NVIDIA and Intel HPC enhancements will be available on PowerEdge servers in early 2020.

Dell EMC Ready Solutions For HPC Storage

Dell is expanding its portfolio of Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC storage with turnkey solutions for ThinkParQ’s BeeGFS and ArcaStream’s PixStor file systems. Offering a combination of pre-validated technology partners’ software with Dell EMC hardware, networking and support, Ready Solutions for HPC Storage aims to simplify and speed deployment and solutions management.

Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS Storage, with ThinkParQ’s software-defined parallel file system, speeds-up input/output (I/O)-intensive workloads with the ability to scale from small clusters to enterprise-class systems on premises or in the cloud.

Additionally, Ready Solutions for HPC PixStor Storage offers a high‑performance parallel file system, enabling data management at scale with the ability to perform archive and analytics in place. The solution also includes a validated design with object, tape and cloud tiering capabilities using PixStor Ngenea along with PowerEdge servers, PowerSwitch and Mellanox networking, PowerVault storage – supported by Dell Technologies deployment and support services.

Expanded Capacity For Dell EMC PowerVault ME4

Dell Technologies has created expanded capacity for Dell EMC PowerVault ME4, offering 16TB HDDs that allow customers to scale to 4PB in 15U rack space. The new offering represents a 25 percent improvement in density, allowing for more HPC storage capacity in a smaller space. Dell’s PowerVault line brings scale, bandwidth and built-in data protection to HPC configurations with management simplicity.

Dell EMC launched its PowerVault ME4 storage arrays in 2018 purpose built for simplicity with a starting list price of under $13,000. The PowerVault ME4 is optimized for SAN and direct-attach storage to Dell EMC PowerEdge servers to support a wide range of business applications and enables channel partners to better attack the SMB market.

The new Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 with 16TB HDDs will be available in early 2020.

Ready Solutions For AI

Dell EMC is expanding its Ready Solutions for AI portfolio with an all-new validated design for the Domino Data Science Platform. Developed in collaboration with Domino Data Lab, the Dell EMC validated design enables data scientists to develop and deliver models faster while providing IT with a centralized platform spanning the entire data science lifecycle.

Dell introduced five new reference architectures for optimizing Dell EMC technologies with AI partners including DataRobot, Grid Dynamics, H20.ai, Iguazio and Kubeflow on Red Hat OpenShift. The new architectures allows business to speed up deployment of AI solutions to automate and transform their data center using Dell EMC converged infrastructure, servers, storage and data protection technologies. The reference architectures are optimized for Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Ready Solutions for AI design for Domino Data Science Platform will be globally available in December 2019. Ail reference architectures for Data Robot, Grid Dynamics, H20.ai and Iguazio will become available this quarter.