Dell gets into supercomputers with desktop clusters

Dell, best known for direct sales of personal computers, has quietly glided into the clustering market, where the big processing power of lone supercomputers can be recreated by groups of ordinary PCs and larger server computers.

Once correctly networked, inexpensive Dell units are transformed into a high-horsepower computing device.

The next step, according to the company is to push this type of computing power - once only available through giant supercomputers costing hundreds of thousands of euros - onto the desktop.

"High-performance clusters have really taken over the supercomputing area," according to Mr Kevin D. Libert, Dell EMEA enterprise systems director.

The firm has sold one such cluster of 50 computer servers to University College Cork, where it will be used for research and also networked into Grid-Ireland, an all-island research "grid" of such clusters.

Until recently, clusters were primarily experimental systems used by large government and academic organisations for research. But with price drops and performance gains in PCs and servers, they've become a reasonable investment for industry, said Mr Libert.

According to Dell Ireland, the servers used for clustering are becoming commodities, which is the point at which Dell likes to enter markets and compete on price and performance. The firm sees itself as riding the third wave of high-performance computing: the first being the use of supercomputers; the second the move to clusters of expensive desktops, and now, the third being the shift to cheaper servers and PCs.

Because PCs used for clustering can also be retired to serve as ordinary desktop computers in an organisation, they are seen as an efficient use of information technology budgets, say analysts.

Organisations as different as discount retailer Wal-Mart, the University of New York, Daimler-Chrysler and film company iMax are using clusters for various purposes, said Mr Libert.

Wal-Mart used a supercomputer and programs for analysing massive amounts of data to keep tabs on its products. A large database system tracked the movement of products off store shelves, by individual stores and for parts of the countries in which the retailer operates.

Wal-Mart also recorded products that might appear in a given customer shopping basket (useful for analysing which products should be sold next to others), and had even opened up its database to suppliers who could use it as a kind of virtual warehouse, to know when to ship products to the stores.

A few years ago they swapped the supercomputer for clusters of computers that can be networked together, even though they are spread across geographic regions. The database is designed to break down computing problems into smaller pieces that can then be tackled by the computers on the network - with 500 individual programs contained in one large application, said Mr Libert.

The cluster can handle computations in a fifth of the time of the big program on the supercomputer, and costs dropped to one-10th of former figures, according to Dell and Wal-Mart.

Some 95 per cent of the clusters Dell sells are running the open-source, Unix-based operating system Linux. Mr Libert says this is mainly because clustering emerged in environments using Unix, and Linux is emerging as the inexpensive and stable operating system of choice for clusters. Dell is also partnering with supercomputer giant Cray, which is offering expertise in software and management of high-performance computing, while Dell offers the hardware.

Dell has 1,300 people working in its research and development area in servers and clusters, with 60 focusing on clusters alone. The firm has been eyeing the lucrative, higher-margin server space for more than a year and the clustering strategy fits well within that market, say analysts.