Dell high-performance computing clusters are powering more of the world's important research at leading institutions such as The Pennsylvania State University's Academic Services and Emerging Technologies (ASET), a unit of Information Technology Services (ITS).

Penn State is deploying three clusters using nearly 400 Dell^TM PowerEdge^TM  servers running Red Hat Linux to solve complex computational problems for research projects in biology, chemistry, meteorology and physics departments. These include the modeling of weather patterns, the prediction and control of human disease epidemics, models of intervention strategies for control of bio-terrorism agents, the study of laser abalation - the procedure used in LASIK laser eye surgery, gravitational physics and economic-theory modeling.

Customers, like the researchers in ASET, are realizing the advantages of using clusters of standards-based servers to process large amounts of data and complex computations as a cost-effective alternative to proprietary supercomputers.

Citing superior value, high performance, ease-of-use and scalability benefits, government, university and corporate customers are deploying Dell clusters for diverse applications in industries such as financial services, bioinformatics and life sciences, automotive design, graphical rendering and energy.

"The Dell high-performance computing clusters have provided Penn State researchers the power to help solve the most complex computational problems, and the flexibility to address applications from many different disciplines at Penn State," said Vijay Agarwala, director of the Graduate Education and Research Services (GEaRS) group, a unit of ASET. "Now academic departments across the campus are lining up to use our clusters - so much so that we've had to set a formal scheduling system in place to accommodate everyone's projects. The exceptional support and reliability we've experienced with Dell has enabled us to accommodate all of the research."

ASET's original cluster consists of 33 PowerEdge servers with a total of 64 processors running Red Hat Linux; it is nicknamed "Lion-X" after the University's mascot, the Nittany Lion. The second cluster Penn State deployed is a 128-node, 256-processor cluster called "Lion-XE" to address additional research project requests and data processing needs. Most recently, ASET added a third cluster, "Lion-XL," of 92-node dual-processor PowerEdge 2650 servers with Intel^¨ Xeon^TM  processors to meet new requirements for computing power in their clusters, which now total nearly one TeraFlop.

"Penn State's ASET/ITS is another example of the continuing trend by the world's leading researchers leveraging standards-based supercomputers to conduct advanced research," said Russ Holt, vice president and general manager, Dell's Enterprise Systems Group. "The supercomputing world is experiencing the benefits of standards-technology led innovation which has been delivered into general purpose server computing over the last decade."

Holt and Agarwala will be on a media teleconference today at 1:00 p.m. CDT for an open discussion about the Dell high-performance computing cluster program and the University's use of its clusters. To join the call dial (800) 289-0730 or international (913) 981-5509 passcode: Russ Holt.

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