Dell recently announced that a handful of American universities would be implementing their cloud-ready PowerEdge C6100 high-density rack servers for research in the life and earth sciences and beyond.
According to Vince Kellen, CIO at the University of Kentucky, his institution chose Dell based “on their legacy in working with academia across the globe in HPC and [our] interest in exploring new uses of HPC computing analysis in language arts and sciences.” Kellen went on to note that the cloud-enabled nature of the servers complements his university’s vision to become a top 20 public research university by 2020 as the servers support their “aim to experiment with HPC in the cloud over the next several years.”
Dell has been in the HPC headlines over the past few weeks as it reveals where some implementations of its C-series systems have taken place. The company has been pushing its line of HPC-oriented products since March when the cloud-capable systems were first announced. News that the University of Colorado at Boulder, among others, have adopted their systems helps give Dell’s HPC and technical computing-driven message some added punch.
While the servers are technically “cloud ready” during an interview with Dell in mid-September, there were no HPC cloud use cases that they were able to reveal at NASA (where they are using Dell’s new servers) or the string of universities that were tied to their series of announcements. For now, HPC cloud plans for these servers, at least on the public and technical computing level remain in the “ambitions” stage as Kellen noted, but it is now a possibility.