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Dell EMC and Nvidia sign GPU deal aimed at HPC, data analytics and AI

Dell EMC said it will also launch products based on Nvidia's Volta architecture by the end of the year.
Written by Steve Ranger, Global News Director
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Vladimir_Timofeev, Getty Images/iStockphoto

Nvidia and Dell EMC will jointly develop GPU-accelerated offerings for high performance computing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence.

As part of this combined effort, Dell EMC will work with Nvidia to support the new Volta GPU architecture and intends to launch Volta-based accelerators by the end of the year.

Volta is Nvidia's new GPU architecture for computational and data science, and is capable of more than 100 Teraflops -- trillion floating point operations per second -- a five times increase over the previous generation Pascal architecture. Dell EMC said the deal would "further democratize and advance HPC."

Nvidia accelerated computing group general manager Ian Buck said deep learning is increasingly strategic for every major technology company. "Specifically, artificial intelligence is being driven by leaps in GPU computing power that defy the slowdown in Moore's law."

Dell EMC also said it is working with CoolIT Systems to provide a factory-installed, direct contact liquid cooling system for CPUs. The system uses warm water to cool the CPUs, eliminating the need for chilled water and reducing cooling energy costs by up to 56 percent for data centre infrastructure, and also allows customers to pack in more hardware. The cold plate system will be available in a select Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers.

Dell EMC is keen to grab a bigger chunk of the HPC market, worth more than $30bn across servers, software, storage, cloud, pointing to new high performance systems using its technology. These include the new $12m system at the Cambridge Research Computing Service in the University of Cambridge, a system aimed at addressing large scale high I/O data-intensive workloads during scientific research. Wilkes-2, which appears at number 100 on the TOP500 list and number five on the Green500 list, is the largest GPU-based system in the UK and the highest-ranked Dell EMC delivered system on the Green500 list.

The recently-upgraded Stampede 2 system at Texas Advanced Computing Center is now at number 12 on the TOP500 list and number 32 on the Green500 list.

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