Not long ago, 2018MAXP China High Performance Cloud Computing
The innovation competition has just ended, and a standout
The winner of the "Personal Excellence Award" was interviewed by the author.
He, from Dell EMC China,
Is an HPC solution and technical engineer...
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As an employee of Dell EMC China, actively participating in the HPC Innovation Competition in his own name fully demonstrates Dell EMC's support and positive energy for employees in HPC innovation practice, and also reveals Dell EMC's commitment to promoting the popularization of HPC. Strategy.
Of course, behind the successful award, Dell EMC's unique accomplishments in the field of HPC technology and applications, as well as its success in the implementation of HPC solutions and user practice, are indeed indispensable.
Driven by innovation, consolidating the road to HPC popularization
Prior to this, the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, Mr. Michael Dell, put forward the guidance of "HPC popularization". Thus, from a strategic perspective, Dell EMC is driven towards the popularization of HPC.
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HPC should not only be used by global and national scientists and professional researchers, but also become a popular platform for teachers, engineers, designers, students and other mass groups to accelerate innovation.
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According to the analysis of IDC, a global professional analysis agency, China has already become the hottest market for supercomputing in the world. Not only that, HPC has also been highly valued by the country. As early as 2015, HPC was written into the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan". In this regard, Dell EMC China attaches great importance to the development of HPC in China, based on the global HPC popularization strategy, adhering to the Dell China 4.0 strategy of "in China, for China", and adopts a gradual and step-by-step approach.
In this regard, Ling Weicai, head of Dell EMC China's HPC solution, pointed out that Dell EMC will promote and assist the innovative development of China's HPC through the "four modernizations".
The "four modernizations" mentioned here include templating, standardization, community forum and internationalization.
Among them, templating is to ensure the advanced nature of HPC scheme design and promote the rapid development of HPC into the next stage.
Standardization plays a very important role in ensuring the integrity, reliability and ease of use of HPC solutions for installation and deployment, which are the aspects that HPC users are most concerned about.
At the same time, the establishment of community forums is conducive to allowing industry insiders to exchange experience and communicate during the operation and maintenance stage, and improve the operation and maintenance level of HPC technical solutions.
Of course, China's HPC also needs to go international, and maintain a leading and innovative pace with the global HPC technology development through information express, industry news, conference exchanges, etc.
To this end, Dell EMC is rooted in the direction of the four modernizations of HPC, unites with Chinese partners, adopts community standards, builds an HPC platform ecosystem, accelerates the application and popularization process of HPC in China, and meets the needs of Chinese HPC users in the open, reliable and , high scalability, easy deployment, easy management and other practical needs.
In order to innovate and empower on the road of HPC development, Dell EMC not only focuses on the traditional application fields of HPC, but also devotes itself to building the functions of HPC in new applications in the fields of gene sequencing, precision medicine, manufacturing, and artificial intelligence and deep learning. It has become a mainstream technology to serve a wider range of users, so that enterprise users of all sizes can use HPC technology to realize business and application innovation, and move towards a more valuable digital transformation road.
Of course, if you want to push the unpredictable HPC to the road of popularization, further promote the application and popularization of HPC, and make HPC "available and affordable" to more people, there is no effective method. Innovation strategies are certainly not going to work.
In this regard, Dell EMC China, relying on the concept of innovation empowerment, has continuously strengthened the HPC popularization strategy from three aspects.
first
Dell EMC has cooperated with Tsinghua University and Shanghai Jiaotong University to establish the HPC Innovation Center. At the same time, it has also cooperated with the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to jointly build the "Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Joint Laboratory" . AI and deep learning R&D and service platform.
the second aspect
Dell EMC works with global partners to build the HPC ecosystem. Including cooperation with global technology and solution providers such as Intel, NVIDIA, Mellanox, Bright Computing, Altair PBSworks, etc., integrating global concept resources in network, open source projects, processors, software, consulting, services, operation and maintenance, applications, etc., to build A diverse HPC ecosystem.
the third aspect
Leveraging Dell EMC's strengths in solution integration, it has launched a simplified HPC system portfolio globally provides the flexibility of a custom HPC system with the speed, simplicity and reliability of a preconfigured system. With a simplified configuration and ordering process, businesses of all types can select and deploy updated Dell EMC HPC systems faster.
It is precisely because Dell EMC has continuously strengthened the promotion of the three major HPC popularization strategies, which has also built up its unique advantages in the HPC field. With the help of global resource integration, continuously increase China's strategic investment in HPC, use standardized open product solutions, and use the Future Ready Enterprise Cloud Alliance (FRECO) initiated by Dell EMC to create an HPC ecological environment, simplify HPC deployment and use, and improve HPC innovation and management efficiency to meet the actual needs of the Chinese market and users.
Lock in the rigid needs of the industry, and plan according to local conditions
Under such a move, Dell EMC has already launched HPC solutions for scientific research, life science, and manufacturing in China, and has also jointly launched Dell EMC/Intel Lustre high-performance storage solutions that match HPC applications, as well as Dell EMC NSS general storage solution.
Of course, for just-needed solutions, Dell EMC can make measures according to local conditions, and is also based on its comprehensive HPC products based on its open technologies, including server, storage, network to workstation product portfolios, and HPC management software and platforms provided through strategic cooperation.
Starting from the needs of customers, we continuously improve our own innovation capabilities and the integrity of industrial layout, and at the same time integrate high-quality resources to provide comprehensive, localized and customized end-to-end solutions for different industries and different types of enterprises. Therefore, Dell EMC's HPC applications have extended from traditional scientific research, geology, meteorology, petroleum, military and other "white snow" fields to innovative fields such as life sciences, manufacturing, big data analysis, deep learning, and artificial intelligence.
Today, Dell EMC provides users with validated and certified HPC solutions, from product portfolios to industry solutions, from optimization services to partnerships.
in the field of research
More and more scientific research and key problems in major projects are completed by large-scale, high-performance computers. HPC systems have become an indispensable tool in the research field of universities and scientific research institutions. Dell EMC launched a HPC solution specially suitable for the research field, which is to help research institutions to quickly develop HPC systems according to the unique needs of various workloads to carry out complex scientific analysis, and to build "double first-class" universities and scientific research institutions for colleges and universities Complete scientific research and innovation to provide important support.
in life sciences
High-performance computers have played an extremely important role. Gene sequencing analysis has high requirements on the computing performance, memory capacity, and data bandwidth of high-performance computers. Based on global best practices, Dell EMC has launched a family of fully integrated HPC solutions for life sciences, including high-performance networking, PowerEdge high-performance servers and high-performance storage solutions. Test validation, based on Dell EMC Life Sciences HPC system throughput performance up to 163 genomes per day (10x samples) or 54 genomes per day (50x samples), energy efficiency less than 2kWh/genome (10x samples), with GDAP v1.0 In comparison, the number of genomes processed per day increased by 4.4 times. Compared with GDAP v1.0, the energy consumption (kWh) per genome is reduced by about 3.75 times.
in manufacturing
Taking the automobile manufacturing industry as an example, HPC has become the technical support of GE's "digital twin", and it has also become the core technical support for the transformation of the manufacturing industry to service and industrial upgrading through intelligence. For manufacturing HPC needs, Dell EMC provides users with flexible and high-performance technology options, as well as end-to-end solutions and services to help China's manufacturing intelligently upgrade. It is worth mentioning that Dell EMC can pre-tune the overall solution according to user needs, and optimize the system for a specific application set. Many professional application software has been verified on this system, including ANSYS mechanics. , CD-Adapco, Electronic Design Automation (EDA). In addition, the combination of Dell Precision workstation NVIDIA Tesla GPU and CUDA architecture can provide users with high-performance requirements for parallel computing applications.
in deep learning
Based on the massive data processing, it needs strong computing power, and its research and development need to rely on a powerful HPC platform. Dell EMC builds an end-to-end deep learning HPC platform that simplifies the complete deep learning process from data preparation to analyzing training results, while providing flexible HPC technology frameworks, products, services and expertise. To meet users' new demands for open source software, Dell EMC continues to strengthen its partnership with Bright Computing to simplify the deployment and management of deep learning IT architectures. In 2016, the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dell EMC jointly released the deep learning application and service platform "Zhuge Shenzhi", providing enterprises with deep learning-based big data mining solutions and computing platforms.
Looking back on the road to success, challenges remain
Although Dell EMC has the strategic and tactical capabilities on the road of HPC popularization, as well as a diversified and industry-required end-to-end solution portfolio, there are still many challenges for success. On the road to the popularization of HPC, there are still many problems that need to be solved.
Openness has become the mainstream of HPC, and systems without openness will eventually be eliminated or marginalized. How to form a more open HPC innovative integration solution is very important for the future development of Dell EMC. However, Dell EMC is an HPC system based entirely on the open and standard x86 architecture, and uses cluster technology to continuously improve the overall performance and scalability of HPC. At the same time, it will also integrate and learn from open source projects to create an open source framework for the HPC environment, reduce costs, and speed up popularization and application.
How to make high-performance computing, storage, network, etc. form a better match in expansion and performance, and at the same time need to improve the performance of the overall HPC system to achieve more flexible expansion and rapid deployment? This brings more opportunities for applications that combine GPU technology, high-performance storage, and innovative network architectures.
HPC is closely related to applications, so its architecture needs to face the challenges of diverse needs. In the face of diversified applications with different characteristics such as data-intensive, computing-intensive, and I/O-intensive, the computing, storage, and network design in the overall HPC system will also have more innovative needs.
The biggest cost challenge of HPC for users is power consumption. When the amount of data grows at an exabyte level, low-cost, high-efficiency HPC is often the first choice for users, and only by reducing power consumption can the goal be achieved. Therefore, in the design of the HPC overall system room, it is necessary to adopt more innovative means such as air cooling and liquid cooling.
HPC users lack professional operation and maintenance teams and HPC standardized, automated, and specialized management processes, which is particularly important for HPC end-to-end solutions that meet individual needs. What is more important for users is that, while meeting their own HPC needs, they can achieve rapid deployment, simplify management, and obtain perfect services.
It is true that the road to the popularization of HPC is constantly challenged, but Dell EMC has established an industry benchmark on the road to popularization of HPC with the help of its own software and hardware resources, thereby driving the further development of HPC.
In the Protein Research Technology Center of Tsinghua University, the Dell PowerEdge FX2 computing solution was introduced to build a biological HPC platform. In-depth analysis and calculations of protein structures with a resolution of 3.6 angstroms were performed.
In the high-performance computing center of Shanghai Jiaotong University, because it was built in 2013, the resistance of the old IT is relatively large. The HPC storage system of Shanghai Jiaotong University was upgraded, and Dell's HPC storage solution based on Intel Lustre was selected. Through node upgrade and expansion, it provides guarantee for future business development and guarantees Shanghai Jiaotong University's demand for HPC system capacity and performance. At the same time, through automatic hierarchical processing, it can meet the performance requirements of object storage management data.
In terms of platform construction on a larger scale, Dell and the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have cooperated to build a service platform based on deep learning - "Zhuge·Shenzhi". Dell positions the "Zhuge·Shenzhi" deep learning application and service platform as a one-stop solution that provides hardware, software and professional services. The service platform includes hardware platforms, algorithm engines and industry applications. Dell mainly provides HPC hardware platforms.
The future of HPC requires more perseverance and endurance
On the road to marketization, commercialization, and popularization of HPC in an all-round way, Dell EMC has the resources and advantages of technical products, industrial ecology, solution integration, and benchmarking cases. However, if we want to help more enterprises and institutions realize HPC-based innovation and drive development, we need more perseverance and endurance in promoting the establishment of the high-performance computing platform ecosystem.
In response to the diverse application needs of HPC in the process of digital transformation of Chinese enterprises, Dell EMC provides highly flexible and precisely designed HPC systems in multiple vertical industries to help users achieve business innovation and development.
In order to enhance the application value of users in the HPC field, Dell EMC provides factory integration services, deployment services and remote management services for Chinese users in HPC services, as well as complete end-to-end consulting services and solutions, including applications, business Process, consulting, infrastructure and support, as well as service solutions in mobility and security. In addition to the different levels of "ProSupport" services, there is also Dell EMC's team of technical experts to provide professional services. As a result, it has built a more secure backing for HPC users' applications, and demonstrated the long-term persistence and lasting power of Dell EMC's "focus on meeting user needs" on the road to HPC popularization.
Shen Yao's Science and Technology Observation was founded by Shen Yao (WeChat: shenyao) , a cross-border technology media person . He has 15 years of media work experience and has experience in self-driving on 100,000 kilometers of highways in China and the United States. Column, dedicated to the observation and thinking of the technology industry, here to understand the technology industry, know the trend, and win the future!