Brigham Young University Installs Six Dell Supercomputing Clusters

Wednesday, Aug 03 @ 12:19 PDT
Brigham Young University (BYU) has installed six new Dell supercomputing clusters at its Provo, Utah campus, helping to enable students and faculty across the university to enhance research ranging from business and engineering to agriculture and physics.

The clusters, made up of 682 Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers and PowerEdge 1855 blade servers, range in size from 11 to 217 nodes. They're located at six locations across campus. Four of the clusters are connected using Gigabit Ethernet links. The largest cluster also uses Cisco's(TOPSPIN) Infiniband interconnects which can maximize cluster performance and scalability. Together, the six clusters have a combined theoretical peak performance of more than 9 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS).

Researchers on campus plan to use the systems to study mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering, industrial design and rendering, agricultural research and chemical analysis. Students in BYU's Marriott School of Business will use the clusters to do advanced statistical modeling.

A number of the servers used to build the clusters were racked, cabled and shipped from Dell's Merge Center in Austin, Texas. BYU received completely assembled and populated racks, virtually eliminating the need to manually install components or dispose of boxes and packing materials. Dell Services conducted an onsite data center assessment to help ensure BYU's facilities had the power and cooling capacity for the clusters before they were installed. Dell also assigned a project manager to work at BYU during the installation to help ensure deployment went smoothly and stayed on schedule.

"We're very excited to have the new supercomputer and are grateful to donors Ira and Mary Lou Fulton for their generosity in helping to provide it," said Kelly Flanagan, BYU vice president of information technology. "Students and faculty will greatly benefit from the quantum leap we've just taken in processing power."

John Mullen, vice president of Dell's higher education business, said this computing facility is another great example of how universities can get more processing power for their budgets by deploying standards-based clusters.

"Dell continues to drive down the cost of supercomputing using standards-based technologies," Mullen said. "Supercomputing clusters are enabling universities to do research that was previously cost-prohibitive. We look forward to sharing in BYU's research and discoveries."

BYU's new clusters are simplifying life for its IT department as well as for researchers. Dell's PowerEdge 1855 blade servers can deliver the same features but with better pricing, greater density and reduced power and cooling requirements when compared to Dell 1U servers.

< BACK