Savtira streams media and apps from the cloud with beefy PowerEdge C combo

April 18, 2011

Savtira Corporation, who provides outsourced Cloud Commerce solutions, has chosen Dell DCS’s PowerEdge C line of servers and solutions to deliver streamed media and apps from the cloud.  Dell’s gear will help power the Savtira Cloud Commerce platform and Entertainment Distribution Network (EDN).

With a little help from PowerEdge C, businesses will now be able to use EDN to stream all digital media (business apps, games, music, movies audio/ebooks) from the cloud to any device.  One of the particularly cool features is, since the state and configuration are cloud-based, consumers can switch between devices and pick up exactly where they pushed pause on the last device.

Talk about supercharging

To power Savtira’s EDN data center, the company picked PowerEdge C410xs packed with NVidia Tesla M2070 GPUs and driven by PowerEdge C6145s.  If you think GPUs are just for rendering first-person shooters, think again.  GPUs can also cost-effectively supercharge your compute-intensive solution by offloading a lot of the processing from the main CPUs.  According to NVidia, for 1/10 the cost and with only 1/20 of the power consumption, GPUs deliver the same performance as CPUs.

To  help you get an idea of the muscle behind this solution, the PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis holds up to 16 of the Tesla M2070s GPUs, each of which exceeds over 400 cores.  Two fully populated C410xs are in turn powered by one PowerEdge C6145 for a combined total of 33 Teraflops in just 7U.

Talk about a lot of power in a little space :)

Extra-credit reading

  • PowerEdge C6145 — Dell DCS unveils its 4th HPC offering in 12 months, and its a beefy one
  • PowerEdge C410x — Say hello to my little friend — packing up to 16 GPGPUs
  • NVIDIA: from gaming graphics to High Performance Computing

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

El Reg gives DCS props for HPC innovation

October 5, 2010

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:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

NVIDIA: from gaming graphics to High Performance Computing

September 22, 2010

A few weeks ago a group from NVIDIA was out visiting Dell.   Their Tesla series of GPU cards are the primary cards that are used in our newly announced C410X expansion chassis.  Filling up the C410X with NVIDIA cards and attaching it to a server can bring about ginormous increases in compute performance, helping to make HPC and scaled-out deployments wicked fast.

So how did NVIDIA get from rendering graphics for first person shooters to creating GPUs that accelerate modeling, simulation, imaging, signal processing,  etc?  Listen to the interview below with Geoff Ballew of NVIDIA’s Tesla unit and learn. :)

Some of the ground Geoff covers:

  • NVIDIA’s not just for gaming any more
  • A few years ago found that their graphic chips were getting a lot of raw math horsepower, so they added a few extra features into the chips and built a suite of software so that the graphic cards could be used for general computation.
  • How hard was it to convince HPC customers to take NVIDIA seriously in the compute arena?
  • What kind of performance gains are they seeing?
  • The accompanying software development tools and ecosystem of partners
  • The shift in NVIDIA’s workforce and culture as they’ve gotten into general compute processing – united by their love for GPUs :)

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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