Barton's Blog

The week before last a crew from Dell was out at NVIDIA’s GPU tech conference, showing our latest and greatest offerings in the HPC space.  It looks like our PowerEdge C410x expansion chassis system caught the eye of the Register HPC blog writer Dan Olds.

Below are some excerpts from Dan’s article, “Dell gets busy with GPUs” followed by the video he shot.   I love the video theme music and the fact that its a “BPV (Bad Production Values) presentation.”  [BTW We’ll have to give Dan the full Data Center Solutions(DCS) rundown at some point so that he can see that when it comes to design and innovation, the C410x is not an outlier 🙂 ]

From Dan’s Article:

Okay, let’s put it on the table: when the conversation turns to cutting-edge x86 server design and innovation, the name “Dell” doesn’t come up all that often. Their reputation was made on delivering decent products quickly at a low cost. I see that opinion in all of our x86 customer-based research – it’s even something that Dell employees will cop to.

That said, two of the most innovative and cutting-edge designs on the GPU Tech Conference show floor were sitting in the Dell booth, and that’s the topic of this video blog….

It’s the second product that really captured my interest. Their PowerEdge C410x is a 3U PCIe expansion chassis that can hold up to 16 PCIe devices and connect up to eight servers with Gen2 x16 PCIe cables. Customers can use it to host NVIDIA Fermi GPU cards, SSDs, Infiniband, or any other PCIe device their heart desires. What made my motor run was the possibility of cramming it full of Fermi cards and then using it as an enterprise shared device – NAC: Network Attached Compute.

…Dell deserves kudos for putting out this box. It’s a step ahead of what HP and IBM are currently offering, and it moves the ball forward toward an NAC future.

Extra credit reading:

• The C410x: Say hello to my little friend — packing up to 16 GPGPUs

• NVIDIA: from gaming graphics to High Performance Computing

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 5th, 2010 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.