Unleash the power of parallel computing with the Dell EMC PowerEdge C6320p

With #SC16 in full swing this week, Dell EMC has a strong presence here per usual.  While we’re spending a great deal of time meeting with customers and partners, presenting and demonstrating our latest HPC technologies, I wanted to share some detail on our highly anticipated PowerEdge C6320p Server that will be available next month.

As you know, highly parallelized computing plays an important role in high performance computing (HPC). Compared to serial computing, parallel computing is much better suited for modeling, simulating and understanding complex, real world phenomena. In many cases, serial programs “waste” potential computing power. Parallel software is specifically intended for parallel hardware with multiple cores, threads, etc.

Historically, parallel computing has been considered to be “the high end of computing,” and has been used to model difficult problems in many areas of science and engineering. However, today, with the emergence of Big Data and Machine Learning, commercial applications provide an equal or greater driving force in the development of faster computers. These applications also require the processing of large amounts of data in sophisticated ways that parallel computing allows.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6320p Server- High performance for parallel coding, low- latency with simplified management

The PowerEdge C6320p server is specifically designed to address this parallel processing environment. It delivers both the parallel processing capability and power, as well as the low latency throughput.

Working through increasingly complex problems needs not just fast, accurate results – raw performance – but also a properly balanced and integrated system. The system delivers greater throughput along with processing capacity to manage the rapid data growth and increased workload demands.

The PowerEdge C6320p is a half-width 1U server node, powered by the Intel Xeon Phi processor and purpose-built for dense, highly parallel, high performance computing environments. With up to 4 nodes housed in a C6300 chassis, it delivers 288 out-of-order cores in a 2U space. It also delivers better performance for parallel code by using the Intel Xeon Phi processor with up to 72 out-of-order cores, and providing a choice of low latency IO options – with either Intel Omni-Path or Mellanox EDR InfiniBand fabrics. The integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 8 (iDRAC8) with Lifecycle Controller streamlines operations by simplifying and automating the steps to deploy, monitor, and update PowerEdge C6320p servers and ensures higher levels of service and availability – without using OS agents that interfere with application performance.

Applicability across various industry verticals

The C6320p server is ideal for data intensive computation in a number of areas, like seismic analysis, machine learning and weather simulation.  In organizations undertaking more complex and time-sensitive computational tasks, scalability becomes critical. The C6320p can scale rapidly across large distributed systems, enabling the construction of complex neural networks.

It’s important to note that the Intel Xeon Phi processor is binary-compatible with other Intel Xeon processors, which allows you to protect your coding investment by using the same x86 code/developer base & optimizations you already know. Standardizing on Intel architecture means you can use a single programming model for your code, helping increase efficiency through a shared developer base and code reuse, and minimizing the need to retrain programmers to new interfaces, methodologies, and languages – saving time and costs.

Results that get breakthrough HPC performance

  • Increased application performance: HPC applications that are highly vectorized and parallel can perform two times faster with the Knights Landing Intel Xeon Phi that can execute 32 double-precision floating point operations per cycle.
  • Faster insights to Big Data: The Knights Landing processor also includes an on-package 16GB memory module called multi-channel DRAM (MCDRAM) in addition to traditional DDR4 memory. This allows the data to be placed close to the computation (cores) and accessed much faster than going to the system memory, allowing for more computational efficiency.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6320p, available later this year, is a balanced platform design of powerful processing and low latency IO reaches deeper insights for research faster. The PowerEdge C6320p complements Dell EMC’s existing HPC offerings, providing a solution optimized for highly parallel workloads. If you’re at SC16, swing by booth #1217. We’d love to talk with you more about this server and plenty of other technologies and solutions we’ll be demo-ing all week!

About the Author: Ed Turkel

I've joined Dell's growing HPC team in the role of HPC Strategist, helping to develop Dell's evolving HPC Strategy, as Dell EMC increases its investments in this strategic and growing market.