Today's high-performance computing (HPC) solutions are accomplishing more than ever, from near-instantaneous financial transactions to life-saving medical discoveries and more. While these advances alone are impressive, HPC solutions ultimately depend on faster CPUs and GPUs processing more data than ever.
HPC in action
The best way to observe the power of HPC is to look at the new and critical ways it's being used. For example, in health crises like COVID-19, life sciences companies must find safe and effective treatments as quickly as possible. The challenge is that clinical trials produce vast amounts of data that need to be analyzed. HPC provides the processing and data storage power required for vaccines, pharmaceuticals, genomics, and epidemiology discoveries.
Still, not only is the speed of HPC enhancing public health but informing financial decisions. After all, from retail shopping to lending and investing, time is money. As a result, financial services companies of all kinds use lightning-fast HPC computing to detect fraud, assess risk, and enable high-speed trading.
The applications of HPC don't stop at healthcare and financial services. Rather, the list of industries leveraging its power continues to grow. Look no further than AI-assisted manufacturing and autonomous mining as examples. Additionally, HPC is even being used to automate one of the critical components used in HPC hardware: semiconductors.
Dell EMC PowerScale storage - HPC benefits
As HPC continues to be leveraged in new and exciting ways, it may be easy to focus on processing and overlook the importance of data storage. In reality, no HPC solution is complete without access to a large volume of high-speed, reliable data. And that's where Dell EMC PowerScale storage provides invaluable benefits for enterprise HPC workloads:
Performance
Dell EMC PowerScale storage leverages its OneFS OS to read and write data in multiple protocols simultaneously, and support for NVME and all-flash configurations are included. This flexibility allows high-performance workloads like AI to process data as fast as possible and deliver results.
Scalable
Dell EMC PowerScale storage enables incremental growth to accommodate the ever-expanding, unstructured, high-volume workloads of HPC. And with PowerScale's scale-out architecture, you can quickly increase storage capacity and performance to a maximum of 252 nodes per cluster. As a result, overprovisioning is not necessary.
Storage diversity
With Dell EMC PowerScale storage, you can use multiple storage types all on one platform. For example, scratch storage demands reliable, large-capacity, high-performing data storage. Therefore, a Dell EMC PowerScale all-flash configuration is an ideal solution.
Project or filesystem storage requires a mixture of data persistence and performance. In response, Dell EMC PowerScale offers a hybrid flash solution. And of course, not unlike the enterprise itself, HPC solutions often require high-capacity, long-term data storage. To meet this need, the Dell EMC PowerScale also includes archive storage.
Manageability
With Dell EMC PowerScale HPC storage, you won't need to hire additional expertise because the system is designed to be easily accessed and managed. Within the system, data is accessible simultaneously through HDFS, NFS, CIFS, and Swift protocols. Therefore, there's no need to copy data between multiple file systems making the entire system more straightforward.
And to keep data flowing within the HPC system, the Dell EMC PowerScale integrates with the Altair Accelerator job scheduler to provide QoS and Storage-Aware Grid Acceleration (SAGA).
Dell EMC PowerScale OneFS storage OS
No HPC storage solution would be complete without a rock-solid OS to tie it all together. Dell EMC PowerScale appliances include the OneFS operating system to maintain your HPC storage system's best possible visibility and control of your data. With it, solution providers can manage storage using multiple features.
For example, SmartPools enables the rules-based movement of data between tiers of storage within a single namespace. And, with SmartConnect, you can achieve optimal performance of your HPC storage with intelligent load balancing, failover, and fallback capabilities.
In addition, DataIQ creates a holistic, one pane of glass view of all your HPC storage systems, and AutoBalance automates the data migration and application logic reconfiguration necessary for adding nodes to your scale-out storage solution.
Put Dell EMC PowerScale storage to work for your next HPC solution
To craft the best possible storage solution for your latest HPC application, you needn't divert your staff's expertise to building hardware. Instead, with the right hardware partner, you can maintain your team's focus on developing breakthrough software solutions that leverage HPC to its fullest extent.
UNICOM Engineering is a Dell Technologies Titanium OEM Partner and has had the pleasure of being named Dell Technologies Americas OEM Partner of the Year for two consecutive years. Our team is highly skilled and ready to power your solutions with Dell Technologies' industry-leading portfolio to deliver unique solutions with greater speed and reliability. To learn more about how we can help you drive your solution to market faster, watch our Why Build on Dell Video or visit our website to schedule a consultation today.