PowerEdge C server optimises the latest compute and memory technologies

The notion of aligning HPC and big data has steadily gained traction over the past few years. As analytics and big data continue to be top of mind for organisations of all sizes and industries, traditional IT departments are considering HPC solutions to help provide rapid and reliable information to business owners so they can make more informed decisions. As Dell’s latest future-ready HPC solution, the Dell PowerEdge C6320 helps power the discoveries and insights being made by top research organisations and enterprises around the world.

Additionally, as hyper-converged systems such as Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO: RAIL and Dell’s XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances now make up the fastest growing part of the overall converged infrastructure market, the PowerEdge C6320 along with its embedded management software is an ideal platform for these appliances. According to IDC, sales of hyper-converged systems are expected to increase 116.2 percent in 2015 over the previous year to $806.8 million (USD). The market is expected to experience a 59.7 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019, when it will generate more than $3.9 billion (USD) in total sales.

Dell PowerEdge C6320, purpose-built for high-performance computing fields
The PowerEdge C6320 is designed to offer four independent server nodes in a 2U chassis. Compared to the previous generation, it provides up to two times the performance improvement on the LinPack spec, up to 45 percent improvement on the SPECint_rate benchmark and up to 28 percent better power efficiency on the Spec_Power benchmark. This allows customers to optimise application performance and productivity while conserving energy use and saving traditional data centre space.

The PowerEdge C6320 features the latest generation of Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors and provides up to 18 cores per socket (144 cores per 2U chassis), up to 512GB of DDR4 memory and up to 72TB of flexible local storage. In addition, the PowerEdge C6320 now comes integrated with iDRAC8 with Lifecycle Controller. By leveraging iDRAC8, customers can automate many routine management tasks and reduce the time and number of steps to deploy, monitor and update their servers throughout their lifecycle.

For the most demanding HPC and big data workloads, customers can pair the PowerEdge C6320 with the accelerator-optimised PowerEdge C4130. As organisations are increasingly turning to GPUs for workload acceleration, the PowerEdge C4130 is a GPU dense and flexible rack server purpose-built to speed the most demanding workloads. The PowerEdge C4130 delivers up to 33 percent better GPU/accelerator density than its closest competitors and 400 percent more PCIe GPU/accelerators per processor per rack U than a comparable HP system. The PowerEdge C4130 can also achieve over 7.2 Teraflops on a single 1U server and has a performance/watt ratio of up to 4.17 Gigaflops per watt.

Dell PowerEdge C6320 powers Comet
Comet is a new petascale supercomputer designed to transform advanced scientific computing by expanding access and capacity among traditional as well as research domains. Deployed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, Comet includes 27 racks of PowerEdge C6320 compute nodes and is designed to optimise capacity for modest-scale jobs. Totalling 1,944 nodes or 46,656 cores, Comet provides a five-fold increase in compute capacity versus SDSC’s previous HPC system.

“We like to say that Comet provides ‘HPC for the 99 percent’ – essentially it’s about providing high-performance computing to a much larger research community and serving as a gateway to discovery,” said SDSC director Michael Norman, principal investigator for the Comet project. “In order to provide research to a larger community of users, we needed to start with a solid hardware foundation. We chose the Dell PowerEdge C6320s over competitive solutions because of Dell’s reputation in the HPC space, its leading hardware design and innovations, and for its ease of deployment. We’re excited to be working with Dell as we expand access to researchers who have not traditionally relied on supercomputers to help accelerate discovery.”

Dell PowerEdge C6320 for hyper-converged
Dell provides hyper-converged solutions with pre-configured software and hardware integrated together to target specific solutions for the software defined era. Designed as a modular scale out platform, the PowerEdge C6320 is an ideal hardware platform for these solutions including Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO: RAIL and Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances. The PowerEdge C6320 provides the right mix of processor performance, compute nodes and local storage options with leading agent-free server management tools enabling customers to quickly deploy, maintain and manage their solutions.