Dell Launches Modular Shared Infrastructure Solution

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PowerEdge C8000 Series, a 4U shared infrastructure solution. (Photo:Dell)

Dell announced the PowerEdge C8000 Series, a 4U shared infrastructure solution to allow the mixing and matching of compute, GPU/coprocessors and storage sleds in a single chassis.

The micro server market is heating up, as AMD announced the SeaMicro SM 15000 recently, packing many cores and massive storage into a single chassis. Dell lists high-performance computing and big data applications as the ideal workload for the C8000, requiring high performance per watt and flexibility in configuration.

The PowerEdge C8000 shared infrastructure chassis holds up to eight single-wide sleds or four double-wide sleds. Each compute sled is equivalent to a standard server built with a processor, memory, network interface, baseboard management controller, and local hard drive storage. The PowerEdge C8220 compute sled contains up to eight C8220 nodes with up to 16 processors.The PowerEdge C8220X compute/GPU sled further increases performance, allowing the use of GPUs and other accelerators. The C8000XD storage sled fits up to 1.4x more local storage in 4U of rack space.

Dell-powered Stampede Supercomputer

When the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) announced the Stampede supercomputer last year it was a NSF-funded partnership with Intel and Dell. Last week at the Intel Developer Forum TACC acknowledged that Stampede supercomputer, which could reach 10 Petaflops, will use a combination of Xeon E5 and Xeon Phi coprocessors. TACC is also leveraging the new Dell PowerEdge C8000 series in the system set to go live in January 2013.

“TACC’s Stampede infrastructure consists of several thousand PowerEdge C8000 servers with GPUs to help speed scientific discovery,” said Dan Stanzione, deputy director at TACC. “Dell’s infrastructure is invaluable in our mission of supporting data-intensive computing and visualization in complex computational science and engineering research including weather forecasting, climate modeling, energy exploration and production, drug discovery, new materials design and manufacturing, and more efficient and safer automobiles and airplanes.“

“At Dell, we are constantly working to address our customers’ evolving needs for solutions that deliver the ultimate in performance for their heaviest workloads, while saving on space, energy and total cost of ownership. This focus has resulted in Dell’s sustained leadership in IDC’s density optimized server market share report,” said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Server Solutions, Dell. “Today, based on those customer needs, we are introducing a shared infrastructure solution that provides unprecedented flexibility, performance and efficiency for hyperscale environments.”

The PowerEdge C8000 Series will begin shipping this month.