ISC pitted the world’s biggest names in HPC against each other in a Vendor Showdown Session — and gave the top nod to Dell’s Jay Boisseau.
The annual international supercomputing conference (ISC) is a time when the world’s biggest and best HPC system vendors come together to share their insights in presentations, showcase their latest innovations, and compete for the attention of the industry and its customers.
That was certainly the case this year at the ISC 2019 conference in Frankfurt. The approximately 3,500 attendees who made it to the five-day gathering got a look at the best of the best in the HPC world and to hear from some of the brightest minds in the industry. And that’s the way it was when distinguished technologists went head-to-head in the annual ISC Vendor Showdown session.
Unique to ISC High Performance, the Vendor Showdown comprises an afternoon of presentations by industry powerhouses in computing, networking, data and storage. Speakers are allowed just a few minutes to present their organizations’ newest strategies, products or research developments. A panel of expert moderators asks each speaker a few in-depth, follow-up questions, and the speakers have just five minutes to offer their responses. When the presentations are complete, the audience votes to select a winner.
In this fast-paced showdown, Dell’s Jay Boisseau, an AI and HPC technology strategist, gave the Dell presentation. Here are a few highlights from his presentation:
- Dell has 20 years of leadership in the HPC cluster space. The company built it first HPC cluster in 1999, and now builds TOP500 clusters for the likes of Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), and the University of Michigan — to name a few of the organizations that have recently rolled out new Dell supercomputers.
- The Dell solutions portfolio covers the wide world of HPC needs, from simulation and data analytics to artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. It’s a portfolio based on open standards, optimal configurations and customer choice, and it includes technologies from such HPC leaders as Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, Mellanox, Bright Computing and OpenHPC.
- New entries in the Dell server portfolio include the Dell DSS 8440 server, a computing powerhouse built for the challenges of machine learning. It packs up to 10 full-size accelerator cards in 4U of space, up to 205W CPUs with accelerators in 35C environments, up to 10 drives of local storage and extensive I/O options. Even better, it’s all based on a design that enables accelerators, storage and interconnect on the same switch for maximum performance.
Let’s add a little drama here. The competition in the Vendor Showdown session was stiff, pitting Dell against such HPC powerhouses as Amazon Web Services, Cray and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. And now, the envelope, please…
After all of the speakers had their 15 minutes of fame, the audience voted to give the top spot to the Jay Boisseau presentation made on behalf of Dell. So hats off to Jay for a great presentation that knocked the socks off the ISC audience.
To learn more
To hear some of Jay insights, check out the just-released video with Jay discussing the convergence of AI and HPC with Bill Magro, Intel’s chief technologist for HPC, at ISC 2019.
