• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Dell, University of Texas Team to Benchmark Performance of Standards-Based Supercomputing Clusters

Posted on: Monday, 11 April 2005, 09:00 CDT

Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin have teamed to benchmark high-performance computing (HPC) applications on standards-based computer hardware. The organizations' goal is to develop a better understanding of the performance and to enhance the scalability of applications run on these cost-effective supercomputers.

"Our relationship with Dell has enabled us to offer tremendous computing capabilities to TACC users in Texas and across the US," said Jay Boisseau, director of TACC. "Our new, cooperative benchmarking project will further enhance the systems we offer to researchers nationwide while assisting Dell in providing the best HPC solutions to the community."

TACC will work with Dell's internal HPC group to enhance TACC's testing of the performance and scalability of various processors and interconnects on HPC applications.

"The knowledge, information, and resource sharing between Dell and the TACC will help us to even more effectively and optimally satisfy the supercomputing needs of the researchers and engineers across higher education, the federal government and the private sector by standard-based computing platforms," said Reza Rooholamini, PhD., director, Enterprise Solutions Engineering, Dell.

While the partnership is initially focused on benchmarking and performance analysis of various hardware technologies, it will eventually expand to include evaluation of HPC software technologies; testing of grid-computing technologies; and options for clusters devoted to visualization and data analysis applications.

"Industry standard-based cluster computing has grown significantly over the past few years because clusters have proven to be very cost-effective solutions for the performance they provide," said Tommy Minyard, Research Associate and Manager of TACC's HPC group. "Researchers can now run their applications at a much larger scale and higher resolution while decreasing total time to solution. With Dell's support, we will continue to investigate and improve the performance of applications run in these clustered computing environments and explore new techniques and algorithms for improving performance."

Last year, TACC deployed Lonestar, one of the world's most powerful computing systems. Lonestar is built with a Dell HPC cluster based on the Intel(R) Xeon(TM) processor. TACC recently upgraded the technology powering Lonestar and installed a second Dell cluster, Wrangler, with 64-bit Intel Xeon processors, Myrinet and InfiniBand switches.

About Texas Advanced Computing Center

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) is a leading research center for advanced computational science, engineering, and technology. TACC's mission is to advance the research and education programs of UT Austin and its partners through the application of advanced computing technologies. To fulfill this mission, TACC provides comprehensive advanced computing resources and support services to researchers in Texas and across the nation. TACC also conducts research and development in applications and algorithms, in computing systems design/architecture, and in programming tools and environments to produce new technologies that expand the capabilities of researchers for knowledge discovery. More information on TACC is available at www.tacc.utexas.edu.

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) is a trusted and diversified information-technology supplier and partner, and sells a comprehensive portfolio of products and services directly to customers worldwide. Dell, recognized by Fortune magazine as America's most admired company and No. 3 globally, designs, builds and delivers innovative, tailored systems that provide customers with exceptional value. Company revenue for the past year was $49.2 billion. For more information about Dell and its products and services, visit www.dell.com.

Dell is a trademark of Dell Inc.

Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

Source: Business Wire

More News in this Category