HPC | News

2 Universities Deploy High-Density Rack Servers for Research Computing

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/21/10

Two American universities have installed Dell servers to do research requiring high performance computing (HPC). Both will be using the Dell PowerEdge C6100, high-density rack server with low energy requirements.

The University of Colorado at Boulder will use the new setup for research in earth‐system science, biotechnology, and renewable energy areas. The University of Kentucky in Lexington will be performing research on the new equipment to study the impact of alcoholism on the brain and possible connections with diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular diseases.

The PowerEdge C6100 is a high-density rack server with low energy requirements. It runs Intel Xeon 5600 processors running Novell or Red Hat Linux and can accommodate up to 96 GB of memory. Each node in the unit can be serviced separately from the others.

"Our researchers need HPC systems that are powerful, and the university demands systems that are affordable, as well as space and power efficient," said Henry Tufo, an associate professor of computer science and faculty director of research computing at U Colorado Boulder.

"We chose to work with Dell based on their legacy in working with academia across the globe in HPC and our interest in exploring new uses of HPC computing analysis in language arts and sciences," said Vince Kellen, CIO at U Kentucky. "Dell's platforms complement our vision to become a "top 20" public research university by 2020. Their cloud-ready servers also support our aim to experiment with HPC in the cloud over the next several years."