It’s been an action-packed week at ISC High Performance 2017, the world’s oldest conference and networking event for the high performance computing (HPC) community, which had a record attendee turnout this year. For those who may have missed them, I’d like to share a few Dell EMC HPC highlights from the past few days…

New placements on the TOP500 & Green500 lists

I’m excited to report that Dell EMC has four new entries on the June 2017 TOP500 list, which ranks the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems. Each of these systems also placed well on the new Green500 list, which is a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers. Congratulations to all!

• Stampede 2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is #12 on June 2017 TOP500 list. Stampede 2 also placed #32 on the new Green500 list.
• Cedar at Simon Fraser University, as part of Compute Canada, is at #86 on the TOP500. This system also ranks #13 on June 2017 Green500 list
• Wilkes-2 at Cambridge University ranks #100 on the TOP500, and Cambridge’s Peta4-KNL is at #405. Wilkes-2 holds the very impressive #5 position on latest #Green500 list, while Peta4-KNL places at #20 on Green500.
• Also, the Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab, which appeared in the TOP500 list in November 2016 with 544 nodes with a mix of Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi processors, now sits at #374 in the TOP500 and at #150 on the Green500 list.

2017 Student Cluster Competition

Congratulations also are in order for the Dell EMC-sponsored student team from the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town, South Africa, which took second place in the ISC High Performance 2017 Student Cluster Competition! This sixth annual competition introduced 12 university teams, comprised of six students each, to hands-on experience in applying the knowledge gained through their education, while allowing them to learn valuable new skills in developing basic proposals, obtaining required sponsorships, securing industry partnerships, and designing a platform to run benchmarks and applications within a limited power budget.

Showcasing the latest innovations

The Dell EMC booth was buzzing throughout the three-day exhibition and saw lots of interest in our demos and previews, including:

• The upcoming Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers, which will deliver innovation in three key areas: scalable business architecture that optimizes data centers for a wide variety of new and emerging workload requirements, intelligent automation via expanded APIs and the all-new OpenManage Enterprise console that enables IT to spend more time on higher priority work, and integrated security that protects customers’ businesses and data for the life of the server.
• A new factory-installed direct contact CPU liquid cooling solution designed by CoolIT Systems, which will be available in select Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th generation servers. This cold plate solution uses warm water to cool the CPUs, eliminating the need for chilled water and reducing cooling costs by approximately 56 percent. It also features increased rack density, enabling deployment of approximately 23 percent more equipment.[1]

Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting

The Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting kicked off with a welcome reception and canal-side beach party at Frankfurter Botschaft, followed by a full day of presentations and discussion that began with an opening keynote from Armughan Ahmad, Dell EMC ​SVP, Global Solutions & Alliances, followed by a customer keynote from ​Paul Calleja, ​University of Cambridge Director of Research Computing. Jay Boisseau, Dell EMC HPC Strategist, provided an update on Dell EMC’s machine learning vision, which led off a series of machine learning/deep learning sessions featuring

• Joe Curley, Sr. Director HPC Platforms and Ecosystems, Intel
• Jonas Lööf, Deep Learning Solution Architect, NVIDIA
• Antonio Cisternino, CIO University of Pisa
• Angus Macoustra, Deputy Director, Info Management & Tech, CSIRO

The community meeting wrapped up with a customer keynote from Norbert Eicker, Jülich Supercomputing Center.

The next Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting will take place September 26-27, 2017, in conjunction with the ​Accelerating Understanding Conference at the University of Pisa, Italy. Check dellhpc.org for details.

For everyone who was able to join us in Frankfurt at the community meeting, or visit us at the Dell EMC ISC’17 booth or schedule a personal meeting with our HPC experts, thank you — it was great to see and to hear from you. If you weren’t able to make it to Frankfurt this year, you can always e-mail us with your thoughts, opinions and suggestions, and we invite you to join the Dell EMC HPC Community at dellhpc.org.

[1] Based on Dell EMC internal analysis, April 2017, comparing a hypothetical air-cooled data center with a cooling PUE of 0.6 to a hybrid data center with a cooling PUE of 0.26. A PUE of 0.22 was assigned to all overhead not attributed to cooling. Individual operating costs and other factors will cause results to vary. RS Means industry standards cost basis was used to measure typical cooling infrastructure costs and determine projected savings.

[1] Based on Dell EMC internal analysis, April 2017, comparing a hypothetical air-cooled data center with a cooling PUE of 0.6 to a hybrid data center with a cooling PUE of 0.26. A PUE of 0.22 was assigned to all overhead not attributed to cooling. Individual operating costs and other factors will cause results to vary. RS Means industry standards cost basis was used to measure typical cooling infrastructure costs and determine projected savings.