Mining for Gold in Worldwide Centers of Excellence

With the ever-growing flood of data hitting today’s enterprises, we’re in the midst of a new gold rush. To twist around a line from a Mark Twain character, you might say “there’s gold in them thar hills of data.” But this is true only for those organizations that can put high-performance computing systems, data analytics and artificial intelligence to work to capture nuggets of business value from streams of data.

So how do you get started down this path? Mining value from business data is, arguably, a lot more complicated than panning for gold in mountain streams. To be successful, you need a clear view of your business use cases, the help of experts who have been there and done it successfully, and hands-on experiences with the tools of the trade.

This is where Dell EMC HPC and AI Centers of Excellence enter the picture. These worldwide hubs for innovation and expertise help your organization jumpstart efforts to put the latest technologies to work in order capitalize on data. The centers provide a place where people come together to experience thought leadership, test new technologies, and share research findings and best practices.

People are a big part of the CoE equation. Our HPC and AI Centers of Excellence cultivate local industry partnerships and provide direct input to a wide range of Information Technology creators. Through collaborative efforts, the Centers of Excellence open the door to the vast know‑how and experience in the community, including that of technology developers, service providers and end-users. Even better, the technology companies in the CoE community are eager to incorporate your feedback and needs into their roadmaps.

Let’s get more specific. In Dell EMC HPC and AI Centers of Excellence, you can gain a closer understanding of topics like these:

  • High speed data analytics that help you discover new ways to process, visualize and predict future needs
  • AI, machine and deep learning expertise, best practices, testing and tuning on a wide array of the latest technologies to optimize results
  • Visualization, modeling and simulation of complex data sets using a range of high powered visual computing solutions across multiple locations
  • Performance analysis, optimization and benchmarking to help you find the right technology for the right application and optimize application performance
  • System design, implementation and operation together with monitoring and I/O benchmarking to help avoid performance bottlenecks, decrease power and cooling needs, and address reliability and resilience issues

Advancing blockchain research at a CoE

For an example of the groundbreaking work being done at Dell EMC Centers of Excellence, look no further than the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The Center provides HPC computational resources, services and expertise to accelerate AI research and discovery in academia, industry and government. At this CoE, professionals from Dell Technologies are working with staff from SDSC, industry companies and academic partners to run a blockchain research lab called BlockLAB.

In this hands-on research lab, participants are developing strategies to explore and implement the principal technologies and business use cases for blockchains, distributed ledgers, digital transactions and smart contracts. Among other outcomes, this research is expected to yield a state-of-the-art, end-to-end solution based on a VMware© blockchain stack in a hybrid cloud environment that leverages Virtustream Enterprise Cloud.[1]

That’s the kind of leading-edge research that takes place every day at Dell EMC HPC and AI Centers of Excellence around the world — from North America and Europe to Africa, Asia and Australia.

To learn more

For a closer look at the work taking place in our CoEs, visit the HPC and AI Centers of Excellence site. To explore technologies that help your organization capitalize on the power of HPC, data analytics and AI, visit dellemc.com/hpc. And for a more technical view, check out the performance benchmarks at hpcatdell.com.

[1] Dell EMC, “Dell Technologies Advances Blockchain Research Through BlockLAB,” September 25, 2018.

About the Author: Janet Morss

Janet Morss previously worked at Dell Technologies, specializing in  machine learning (ML) and high performance computing (HPC) product marketing.