Think You Need Different Systems for AI, Data Analytics and HPC? Think Again

With the new Dell EMC HPC Ready Architecture for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, you can now run AI, data analytics and HPC workloads on a single system.

In today’s marketplaces, competitive advantage increasingly goes to the data‑driven enterprise. This is particularly true for those enterprises that are ready to seize the day — and capitalize on the convergence of artificial intelligence, data analytics and high performance computing.

The time is ripe for this convergence, thanks to some amazing advances in HPC systems and the applications that can run on them. As HPC clusters become smaller, simpler, and less costly to deploy and operate, enterprise IT teams can use HPC to provide the throughput and capacity they need to accelerate AI, data analytics and other compute-hungry enterprise workloads, like modeling and simulation.

If your organization is on this path, you’re headed in a great direction. When you converge AI, data analytics and HPC on a single system, you gain the horsepower you need to run high‑performance data analytics, simulation, boost high‑frequency trading, help with drug trials, enhance risk analysis, improve fraud detection, collect and analyze data from the Internet of Things, and accelerate motion picture animation and special effects cycles — just to name a few of the opportunities that come with convergence.

And this brings us to the news of the day — the launch of the new Dell EMC HPC Ready Architecture for AI and Data Analytics.

One system for AI, data analytics and HPC

If you’re in an IT shop, you know that system configuration can be a complex task, requiring a delicate balance among workload requirements, performance targets, data center constraints and your IT budget. With the new HPC Ready Architecture for AI and Data Analytics, you’re home free when it comes to these challenges. Engineers from Dell Technologies have done the heavy lifting for you, so you can confidently and quickly deploy one system for AI, data analytics and HPC workloads.

Like all the other Dell EMC HPC Ready Architectures, this new offering is designed by expert engineering teams to simplify system configuration, deployment and management. The HPC Ready Architecture for AI and Data Analytics has been optimized, tested and tuned for a variety of applications on the Kubernetes stack, with ongoing testing and validation to expand the list of validated options.

Flexible workload management enables dynamic movement of jobs between Slurm and Kubernetes based on user demand, with a scalable shared filesystem to support both. Bright Cluster Manager provides a single‑pane‑of‑glass management experience for Dell EMC hardware, Slurm and Kubernetes. The solution includes a set of Ansible and Terraform playbooks for those who like to build via open source tools.

This is a package, not a single point-product. The HPC Ready Architecture for AI and Data Analytics comes with a best-practices guide and toolkit to help you go from a factory‑installed operating system to a full Kubernetes cluster with a repository on GitHub. And with Bright Cluster Manager software, system admins can quickly get clusters up and running and keep them running reliably throughout their lifecycles.

Great ROI

There is even a return-on-investment (ROI) side of this story. A detailed total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis by Dell Technologies showed that the ability to run multiple workloads on a single infrastructure lowers the cost for hardware, software and maintenance, while providing additional savings from reduced power and cooling costs. This comparative analysis demonstrated that with a converged solution, system users can get faster access to more comprehensive datasets, while IT teams can reduce silos and consolidate operations for up to 3x lower TCO. With this new HPC Ready Architecture, you can now run AI, data analytics and traditional HPC workloads on the same system — simplifying deployment and management while keeping your costs low.