Index to featured Dell customersAntioch Unified School District.....91Cornell University Center for
Advanced Computing ................. 17National Center for
Supercomputing Applications .. 82Pacific Sunwear.................................18Pole Star Space Applications .........19Renewable Energy Systems ........... 17Stony Brook University ....................19Thomas College ...............................18Xtium ................................................... 56
Index to advertisersAdvanced Micro Devices, Inc. ......C3American Power Conversion
Corporation ................................... 67BMC Software, Inc. ......................... 23Broadcom Corporation ....................5Extreme Networks, Inc....................15F5 Networks, Inc. ................................7Intel Corporation ............................. 87Microsoft Corporation ...................C2Network Engines, Inc. .................... 35Oracle Corporation ........................ C4SonicWALL, Inc. ............................... 83
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What do a wind farm developer, a clothing manufacturer,
a maritime security and tracking services provider, and
three institutions of higher learning have in common?
They heightened IT efficiency, reliability, and performance
using Dell™ blade servers.
Cutting-edge agility
Featuresection
“ We’re confident that scientific users and engineers from across the nation will benefit from the reliability and performance of the Dell blade solution.”— David Lifka
Director at Cornell CAC
April 2010
Cornell University: Simplifying HPC solutions on the TeraGrid
HPC is the backbone of the work performed
by the Cornell University Center for Advanced
Computing (CAC), which supports Cornell
researchers and students from scientific
disciplines across the United States. The
center recently received a National Science
Foundation grant to deploy the MATLAB
numerical computing environment to a cluster
called “MATLAB on the TeraGrid.” The goal was
to demonstrate a working model for high-
performance utility computing with MATLAB,
and to encourage other software vendors to
develop similar capabilities.
The cluster uses Dell PowerEdge M600 blade
servers with Intel Xeon 5420 processors running
the Microsoft® Windows® HPC Server 2008
platform and DataDirect Networks storage.
Force10 Networks switches were sourced
through Dell. This HPC cluster allows a wide
range of scientific researchers and students to
use MATLAB to help reduce the time to solution
in a seamless experience, without having to
tackle the complexity and intricacies of parallel
computing. For example, external researchers
were able to remotely access all 512 cores of the
MATLAB cluster to model a hepatitis C virus, a
major cause of liver disease worldwide.
“We’re confident that scientific users and
engineers from across the nation will benefit from
the reliability and performance of the Dell blade
solution while, on the IT side, Cornell will benefit
from reduced power and space requirements and
the ability to maintain the blades with in-house
staff,” says CAC director David Lifka.
RES: Running like the wind on Dell blade servers
For rapidly growing wind farm developer
Renewable Energy Systems (RES), a power-efficient
HPC platform is mission critical. Having built
more than 80 wind farms around the globe, RES
continues to expand into new regions, including
Turkey and South Africa, and had to upgrade its
existing Dell HPC solution to quickly and accurately
assess these complex emerging markets.
Minimizing its carbon footprint and saving
space were key requirements, particularly because
an RES sister company was hosting the system
until a new data center could be built. Because
IT resources were scarce, simplified systems
management was also essential.
The Dell Global Infrastructure Consulting
Services team worked closely with RES to
understand its needs, and recommended
an energy-efficient HPC cluster built on
16 Dell PowerEdge M610 blade servers with
Intel® Xeon® X5550 processors running
Platform Cluster Manager – Dell Edition software.
Mounted in a PowerEdge M1000e modular
blade enclosure and connected with Dell
PowerConnect™ M6220 switches, the cluster
easily fits in the space available, and includes
a Dell PowerVault™ MD1000 direct attach array
for high-volume storage.
“Now we can complete the job in two to
three weeks—approximately 20 times faster—
which means we can get wind farms in place
quicker,” says Peter Stuart, technical manager at
RES. In addition, the company has reduced power
consumption by approximately 75 percent and
freed up valuable IT staff time.
Dell blade servers optimize data center efficiency—and boost organizational agility—through exceptional computing density, energy efficiency, network integration, and manageability
Efficiency has become the watchword across virtually every
line of business. The good news is that technology advances
in today’s blade server infrastructures make it a snap to
optimize data center efficiency and manageability—enabling
organizations around the world to invest newfound IT cost savings
in initiatives that inspire innovation and accelerate growth.
The success stories highlighted here represent a small but
diverse sample of how organizations are putting Dell PowerEdge™
blade servers to work in ways that help maximize IT efficiency
and flexibility, whether to consolidate data center resources,
boost savings on power and cooling, virtualize servers for rapid
deployment, or process data-intensive applications on a high-
performance computing (HPC) platform. Their results may
surprise you.
Powerful performance
In this video, learn more about how Dell blade servers helped RES meet its need for a high-performance, energy-efficient cluster.
