Today, HPC Is Everywhere — and That’s Good News for All of Us

At Dell EMC, the roots of our high-performance computing solutions begin with our community of customers, technology partners and experts in different disciplines. We listen to our community, and then work collaboratively with our customers and partners to deliver HPC solutions that solve real-world problems.

This, in a few words, is what the recent Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting in Austin, TX, was all about. This worldwide technical forum fosters an exchange of ideas among researchers, computer scientists, technologists and engineers to promote the advancement of innovative HPC solutions. At these gatherings, we encourage sustained discussions among experts that lead to the design, deployment, operation and usage of highly effective HPC solutions.

The Dell EMC HPC Community itself encompasses companies from a wide range of industries and universities from around the world. For example, speakers at our March 19-21 meeting included representatives of Enthought, PayPal, Aerofarms, ​Alces Flight, SonicWall and Sylabs. And on the academic research side, we heard from Texas Tech University, the University of Cambridge and Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. We also heard from our partners Intel, NVIDIA, Mellanox, Microsoft, R Systems, and VMWare, along with several HPC specialists from Dell EMC.

When you bring organizations like these together, great things can happen. This is all about collaboration and synergy. Working together, we can accomplish things that none of us could do on our own.

This same spirit of collaboration runs through the Dell EMC HPC & AI Innovation Lab in Austin. This lab encompasses a 13,000-square-foot data center that houses thousands of servers, a TOP500 cluster, and sophisticated storage and network systems. It brings together world-class infrastructure, HPC operational excellence and HPC expertise from a dedicated group of computer scientists, engineers and Ph.D. subject matter experts. The lab gives our customers access to the latest and greatest technologies for HPC, such as the Intel Scalable System Framework for HPC, InfiniBand gear from Mellanox, NVIDIA GPUs, Bright Computing software and next-generation systems from Dell EMC.

Investments like these say a great deal about the Dell EMC commitment to HPC. We are working actively to help all types of organizations use HPC solutions to drive innovation and discovery. We’re passionate about this mission, and we’re deeply committed to helping our customers succeed with HPC.

Let’s consider a few examples of the great work our customers are doing with HPC:

• The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) uses HPC to help researchers gain a better understanding of how vulnerable or resilient our ecosystems and societies are to environmental change.¹
• To empower its Smart City initiative, Fujian University of Technology in China created a high-performance cloud platform to mine and analyze real-time data on local road usage and deliver insights that enable residents to travel more efficiently through reduced traffic congestion.²
• Nakashima Propeller is using computational fluid dynamics applications running on an HPC cluster to support faster, greener shipping by creating propellers that enable ships to move through the water more efficiently.³

Increasingly, HPC is at the core of artificial intelligence (AI), machine and deep learning (ML/DL) applications that build on the base of HPC infrastructure:

• Researchers affiliated with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin use HPC and machine learning technologies to identify brain tumors. ⁴
• In order to stop fraudulent transactions, Mastercard uses machine learning algorithms running on HPC systems.⁵
• AeroFarms is researching a new way to feed our planet that are made possible with the power of HPC and AI.⁶

This list of examples could go on and on, spanning HPC applications in industries ranging from agriculture and mining to autonomous systems and robotic vehicles. In just about any industry, you can now find countless examples of the way in which organizations are using HPC and technologies for AI, machine learning and deep learning to improve people’s lives.

Here’s the bottom line: HPC is now everywhere, and we are all better off because of that.

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Join the Next Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting

The next Dell EMC HPC Community meeting will take place on the afternoon of June 24, 2018, in Frankfurt, Germany, with a reception following the meeting. This exclusive technical forum will feature insightful keynote presentations by HPC experts, technical sessions and discussions, and networking opportunities, including a unique opportunity for open dialogue between customers, leading HPC technology providers and Dell EMC HPC specialists. Visit www.dellhpc.org for more information, updates on the agenda as it evolves and registration.

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1. Dell EMC customer case study, “NASA Center for Climate Simulation propels research science with a homegrown cluster based on repurposed servers,” April 2017.
2. CIO, “Why HPC Matters: Smart Cities,” Feb. 21, 2018.
3. Dell EMC customer case study, “Helping Make Maritime Shipping Faster and Greener,” Nov. 2016.
4. Texas Advanced Computing Center, “Scientists enlist supercomputers, machine learning to automatically identify brain tumors,” Oct. 5, 2017.
5. theCUBE, “Mastercard uses Machine Learning to Protect Customer Data,” October 2016.
6. Dell Technologies customer case study, “Harvesting Insights,” 2017.