The high-performance computing (HPC) market is doing well, and Dell (News - Alert) should be making its mark in that segment of the market with its upcoming PowerEdge C6320 in a 2U chassis.
The HPC technical server market is expected to grow roughly 7.4 percent annually through 2018, according to IDC (News - Alert), reaching a $14.7 billion market cap.
The market leader in the segment is Hewlett Packard currently, with roughly 35 percent of the market, but Dell is looking to improve upon its 17 percent market share with the PowerEdge C6320.
That’s because the server has some impressive stats to show off, namely two times the performance improvement on the leading HPC performance benchmark, a 28 percent increased power efficiency on Specpower over the previous generation, 50 percent more cores per node, 72 TB onboard storage, and 16 DDR4 DIMMs.
“Those kinds of improvements … people have woken up,” said Brian Payne, executive director of Dell Server Solutions. It “can produce more results that fuel a business endeavor or scientific purpose,” he noted.
Dell is trying to hit the sweet spot on price to performance so more organizations can take advantage of HPC technology.
One early customer is the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. It uses 27 racks of C6320s to power its Comet petascale supercomputer. The supercomputer totals 1,944 nodes and 46,656 cores, and delivers 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.
He said that SDSC chose the PowerEdge C6320s because Dell has a good reputation in the space, it leads in hardware design and innovation, and the systems are easy to deploy.
“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.”
That is music to the ears of the folks at Dell.