Dell EMC, technology partners and customers collaborate to speed time to AI

Dell EMC announced details of customer collaborations, services and expanded partnerships in efforts to help new developments in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL).

These developments sharpen Dell EMC’s focus on democratizing HPC, optimizing data analytics with AI innovations, and making Dell EMC solutions available to more mainstream enterprises, while continuing to advance the HPC and AI communities.

Taking the HPC ecosystem as a whole – including servers, storage, middleware applications and services – the industry accounted for a record high $24.3 billion global revenue in 2017 according to Hyperion Research.

With an expected CAGR of 9.8 percent, the HPC research firm expects the sector to reach $38.4 billion by 2022, fueled by investments in big data, AI, ML and DL.

“Successfully deploying artificial intelligence, and its subsets of machine and deep learning, creates immense value, but real-world implementations can be complex,” said Thierry Pellegrino, vice president of HPC at Dell EMC.

“Based on decades of experience with leading institutions, and collaborations with our technology partners and strategic customers, Dell EMC provides an extensive portfolio of technologies – spanning workstations, servers, networking, storage, networking, software and services – to help businesses and organizations, of all types and sizes, deploy HPC solutions that make it simpler to accelerate their artificial intelligence efforts and reach their goals faster.”

Dell EMC HPC deployments fuel AI initiatives

Customers continue to collaborate and deploy Dell EMC HPC solutions to fuel a range of discoveries and solutions development including a strong focus on AI.

Recent deployments include:

• OTTO Motors, based in Kitchener, Canada, manufactures self-driving vehicles for material handling for a wide range of customers including multiple Fortune 100 businesses. OTTO automates material movement jobs like bringing raw materials to the line, cross docking pallets, and moving parts between processes. In order to support the advanced software development of their vehicles, OTTO Motors selected a modern IT infrastructure from Dell EMC. Backed by a range of on-premises Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Dell EMC ProSupport services, OTTO Motors runs thousands of software simulations daily before deploying one of its self-driving vehicles at a client site.
• ZIFF, a Utah-based startup, pioneered the development of an AI database for unstructured image, audio and video data. Part of NVIDIA’s Inception program, Ziff needed to find a server that could help them scale out and that was built for the rigors of deep learning, so they implemented the Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 server. With the Intel Xeon Scalable processors and four NVIDIA Tesla Tensor Core V100 GPUs in a 1U, 2-socket package, the server is helping with their ever-demanding deep learning workloads while dramatically increasing their uptime.
• Zenuity is developing software system technology to bring autonomous cars to market with HPC-as-a-Service managed by Dell EMC Infrastructure Managed Services, with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, Dell EMC Isilon storage, VMware and RSA. High performance computing is wired into these vehicles as they process trillions of operations per second to “see,” with its sensors, all the images, mapping data and audio material picked up by its cameras. The latest on-board computers are now about the size of a license plate and have the capacity of 100-server-datacenter. With 16 sensors, they have enough power to process data detect objects, find the car’s place in the world, plan a path, and control the vehicle itself.
• The University of Sydney’s Artemis 3 supercomputer is based on the PowerEdge C4140, the most powerful Dell EMC compute platform to date, containing the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and four NVIDIA NVLinkTM connected Tesla V100 GPUs per server. The Artemis 3 embraces AI and deep learning to support geophysics, cosmology, genomics and proteomics projects. With a greater number of research problems being data-driven, the Artemis 3 allows for faster processing of data to provide answers to scientific questions that were previously unanswerable.

Dell EMC expands HPC industry collaborations

In addition to a broad ecosystem of HPC partners, Dell EMC has expanded its partnerships with CoolIT Systems, Intel and NVIDIA, increasing collaboration on separate efforts within the Dell EMC HPC and AI Innovation Lab, the 13,000 square-foot showcase and operational data center in Austin, Texas.

This lab hosts the Dell EM Zenith system, which recently has exceeded 1 PetaFLOPS of sustained performance, ranked as #265 on the latest TOP500 list of highest performing HPC systems.

Collaborating with CoolIT Systems, the lab has installed a liquid cooled rack, designed to enable customers and partners to optimize and tune their unique data center workloads on liquid cooled Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 servers.

These servers work in conjunction with corresponding CoolIT Coolant Distribution Units (CDUs) and Rack Manifold products to deliver a complete data center liquid cooling solution that uses water to cool the CPUs, eliminating the need for chilled water in most data centers.

Dell EMC and NVIDIA are collaborating on two key initiatives focused on providing expertise and large-scale lab environments to help customers prove out AI use cases.

In the Dell EMC HPC and AI Innovation Lab, the Rattler cluster enables data science, software development and testing of large-scale GPU applications to demonstrate business value.

Dell EMC and NVIDIA also are collaborating through the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute to teach customers to solve challenging problems and advance innovation in HPC, data analytics and artificial intelligence.

Dell EMC’s continued collaboration with Intel includes the availability of Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the Intel FPGA (field programmable gate array) Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) with a range of Dell EMC PowerEdge14th generation rack servers to support customers’ low latency, real-time AI efforts.

New Dell EMC services simplify HPC for organizations of all types

Dell EMC introduced two services for HPC environments – ProDeploy for HPC and ProSupport Add-on for HPC. The company’s services experts make the HPC solution implementation simple, flexible and worry free from consulting to installation and configuration to comprehensive, single source support.

Dell EMC AI Challenge finalists

This May, Dell EMC launched its own AI Challenge, encouraging entrants to demonstrate practical application of AI technology with a transformational impact on business, research or society.

The top finalists will receive exclusive remote access to a Dell EMC HPC and AI Innovation Lab cluster powered by PowerEdge C4140 servers to run and prove out their proposals.

Availability

• Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 servers are available with liquid cooling.
• Dell EMC ProDeploy for HPC and ProSupport Add-on for HPC services are available in more than 50 countries.

“Every single piece of software that we develop is simulated hundreds or thousands of times before it sees a robot in test, much less a robot in one of our client sites. Having reliable compute infrastructure is critical for this. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers are the foundation of the work we do at OTTO Motors. They provide the automation, security, flexibility and reliability we need to focus on what we do best as a company and at a fraction of the cost of outsourcing to a cloud provider.” – said Ryan Gariepy, co-founder and chief technology officer, OTTO Motors

“Over the last five years, Dell has grown faster than any other major HPC vendor, Dell EMC is delivering the entire solution stack to make HPC and artificial intelligence easier for organizations. Dell EMC’s approach is helping to expand the HPC market to include both traditional and emerging HPC workloads and simplifies technology adoption for non-traditional HPC adopters.” – said Dr. Earl Joseph, CEO, Hyperion Research, LLC

“By providing the opportunity to witness liquid cooling in action, Dell EMC allows customers to assess configuration options and performance capabilities before taking the next step to implementation. CoolIT is proud to enable PowerEdge servers with liquid cooling to support higher wattage processors for increased performance, energy efficiency and rack-level density in today’s modern data center.” – Patrick McGinn, vice president, product marketing and business development, CoolIT Systems

“Artificial Intelligence is a strategic imperative for every major industry and company. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs provide a unified platform for accelerating HPC and AI to help enterprises innovate with incredible speed in ways previously not possible.” – said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager, NVIDIA Tesla Data Center Business