In this video from the Dell EMC HPC Community meeting, Onur Celebioglu describes the Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab, where his team does all of the integration testing and benchmarking for high performance computing systems.
“Every HPC workload and associated data set has specific server, storage, networking and software configuration and tuning requirements to achieve optimal performance. The Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab has been established to provide customers best practices for configuring and tuning systems and their applications for optimal performance and efficiency through blogs, whitepapers and other resources.”
Another part of the lab’s charter is to give remote access to customers and partners for them to test their own codes and data sets. This can range from the selection and testing of available network technologies to fine tuning MPI libraries and other software components such as OpenHPC. This kind of capability is especially important to provide early access to newly introduced technologies such as Intel’s Xeon Phi (formerly code-named Knights Landing) or OPA networking. When combined with the ability to run real world workload-based benchmarks or bakeoffs to compare different technologies and workload profiles, it is an incomparable resource.
The lab has collaborated with a number of Dell EMC HPC Innovation Centers including the University of Cambridge, TACC, San Diego Supercomputing Center, University of Pisa and the Center for High Performance Computing in South Africa. Another example includes collaboration with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on manufacturing applications detailing how to select the optimum processor models for specific manufacturing applications.
The Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab is a 13,000 square-foot facility with 1300+ servers and ~10PB of storage dedicated to HPC research, development and innovation. Its engineers are meeting real-life, workload-specific challenges through collaboration with the global HPC research community and are publishing whitepapers on their research findings. They are utilizing the lab’s world-class Infrastructure to characterize performance behavior and to test and validate upcoming technologies. The lab is also an OpenHPC R&D contributor. Primary focus areas include HPC software stack; compute performance and tuning; interconnect performance and tuning; storage solutions; vertical solutions, such as genomics research and CFD/manufacturing; and proof of concept studies, including OpenStack for HPC and Hadoop on Lustre.
The next Dell EMC HPC Community meeting takes place June 22 in Frankfurt, Germany.
