This amazing supercomputer is a Dell - but few know about it.

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This amazing supercomputer is a Dell - but few know about it.

310 points posted to Advertising and Marketing, Linux, Servers and Storage by jmxz 07/05/07 **PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED**

This amazing supercomputer that apparently went in to operation 3 days ago is a Dell.

Yet looking for info on Dell's web site it's so hard to find (I couldn't find it) that feels like they're embarrassed of it. Did Dell just overlook a great marketing opportunity? Or does Dell have some other reason not to make as hard to find on their web site as other Dell products running the same family of operating systems?

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32716/113/

NCSA: A look inside one of the world's most capable supercomputer facilities
...
Abe is the latest supercomputer to join NCSA. It is scheduled to go into full production on Monday, July 2, 2007. It's currently operating at full capacity and is rated #8 in the world. It operates at a maximum computing capacity of just under 90 teraflops. Its sustained computing capacity is documented at around 63 teraflops. It is a Linux-based cluster comprised of 1200 Dell PowerEdge 1955s blades. Each blade sports two 2.33 GHz Quad-Core Xeons (Clovertown core) on a 1333 GHz FSB operating in Intel64 mode (true 64-bit computing). That's 2400 physical processors housing 9600 cores. The system communicates with itself and the outside world using an Infiniband network at 10 Gbps. It has 200 TB of disk storage and each core has a dedicated GB of memory all to itself, resulting 9.6 TB of DDR2 memory total.
...
#90 - “Tungsten” - 2003 – 16.4 teraflops debuted at #3 in the world...is a Red Hat Linux-based cluster comprised of 1750 Dell PowerEdge 1750

Yet when I go to Dell.com and look for more info:
http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=us&l=en&cs=&k=abe&cat=prod
some stuff on Abe Milstein, but nothing on this impressive Dell computer.
http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=us&l=en&cs=&k=supercomputer&cat=ans
I see a bunch of old news about 2005 and 2002 computers; but if the newest, most impressive ones are in there, you don't make it easy to find.

Ideas:

Put a block describing this stunningly impressive Abe computer in your (small and large) business and government Server pages like this one:
http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/enterprise?c=us&cs=04&l=en...
Put a block describing this stunningly impressive Abe computer in the rotation on the big spot on your home page. Yes, I know not many customers will buy that exact same computer; but they might want to buy a scaled down version. And it'll let them know that Dell can grow with them however big there needs are; while I suspect most people's first impression is that Dell is more the small windows-file-server vendor rather than serious computers.
Make a whitepaper that describes in detail the hardware & software used to make a computer like this one. in case you do have customers that want to build a scaled down version of this.

Or can't you let people know that you made one of the most impressive computers in the world because it runs Linux - so you bury it in hidden parts of the web site like your Ubuntu products?

Dell has had a longstanding relationship with NCSA and we're really proud of the work that's being done on Dell systems. To read more about Dell's high-performance computing clusters click here.

cosh 07/05/07	Your ideas are well written. It's a good point too - Dell is really missing out on the opportunity to show off.
michelle_m 07/20/07	Thanks for bringing attention to this NCSA supercomputing cluster. Dell has had a longstanding relationship with NCSA and we're really proud of the work that's being done on Dell systems. You can read more about Dell's high-performance computing clusters at this website: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/sitelets/solutions/cluster_gri... You'll also find this list of Dell supercomputers that rank among the 500 most powerful in the world. The TOP500 project ranks the sites that operate the most powerful computer systems based on the best performance on the Linpack benchmark. The Top500 List is published twice a year and as of June 2007, Dell HPC Clusters were ranked as follows: 8 NCSA 11 NNSA/Sandia National Laboratories 15 Texas Advanced Computing Center/Univ. of Texas 16 Maui High-Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) 22 Louisiana Optical Network Initiative 24 University of North Carolina 28 Caltech 43 Cambridge University 46 NCSA 53 Stanford University/Biomedical Computational Facility 68 Brigham Young University 88 NNSA/Sandia National Laboratories 89 NCSA 105 Microsoft Windows HPC Group 133 Fraunhofer ITWM 144 University at Buffalo, SUNY, Center for Computational Res. 176 University of Sherbrooke 237 NCSA 254 University of California - Santa Cruz 289 University of Oklahoma 327 KTH - Royal Institute of Technology 432 Imperial College ICT HPC 458 UT SimCenter at Chattanooga 461 Caltech/JPL For a complete list of the Top500 Supercomputing Sites, please visit http://www.top500.org/
michelle_m 07/20/07	Changed status to PARTIALLY IMPLEMENTED.

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