Five Reasons You Need a Data Streaming Platform

5G networks and devices are just starting to trickle into the market, but make no mistake: in a few years, there will be a flood of 5G devices and ubiquitous coverage that will bring with them a never-ending stream of data. That’s not meant to scare you, but to prepare you for a very different world where telcos will need to manage and analyze massive volumes of streaming data in real time. The data analytics and storage path that you take in the next 12 months could very well determine whether you sink or swim when the 5G wave finally arrives.

Dell Technologies’ Streaming Data Platform provides a smart path to analyzing and storing large volumes of real-time and historical data. It represents a new paradigm for managing data, from the traditional store-and-process model to a more efficient process-and-store model that supports real-time analytics. The ability to process and analyze streaming data dramatically improves time to insight—a critical component given that the value of most data quickly diminishes with time—and allows telcos to leverage those insights even before the data is stored.

So, what does this new paradigm look like? Compare these five characteristics of Dell Technologies’ Streaming Data Platform to your current data processing infrastructure:

1. Real-time insights

While telcos have been using data analytics for years, they’ll need to become truly data-driven in order to support 5G services. The Streaming Data Platform enables telcos to analyze data, as they are generated, in real time to troubleshoot network performance, dynamically allocate network resources to ensure SLAs, and track user behavior to improve services.

2. No data silos

Traditionally, telcos have stored data in different silos. In order to aggregate and analyze this data, telcos have turned to technologies such as data warehouses and data marts. These solutions, however, often result in data duplication and conflicting versions of data that compromise reliability. Because the Streaming Data Platform analyzes data in-stream, there is no data duplication and no need to access data silos. The platform can create and store a single copy of data for real-time, interactive, and batch processes.

3. End-to-end visibility of new network functions

The 5G network architecture calls for many new network functions (e.g., User plane, Access management, charging trigger, etc.) that will generate a wealth of data beyond traditional call detail records (CDRs). This data will drive everything from how network resources are allocated to what kind of services are offered to customers. Analysis of this data is time sensitive and, because of the volume of data expected, it cannot be analyzed manually using traditional network management platforms. At the same time, telcos will need to draw this data from across their network; not just in the core but at the edge of the network too. In-stream analysis like that offered by the Streaming Data Platform is the only way to react to this data in real time and approach the automation required by 5G networks, in realizing use cases like network slicing.

4. Seamless operation at scale

Dell Technologies’ Streaming Data Platform is designed to handle extremely large volumes of data—exabytes and beyond—with guaranteed levels of performance and availability. This is achieved in large part by the platform’s use of Pravega, a stream-native storage solution that has built-in auto-scaling for ingestion and analysis. With Pravega, telcos can easily access real-time and historical data for the same analysis; as the data load increases, Pravega’s power also increases, offering seamless operation at scale.

5. Low-latency analytics

Storing data takes time. In the traditional store-and-process paradigm, data must be stored before it can be analyzed. In-stream processing allows telcos to “ask questions first and store later” for faster insights. This, in turn, drives new capabilities such as the dynamic allocation of network resources based on the incoming data rate.

While most telcos are focused on how their networks will handle the rising tide of 5G data, they should also be thinking about what they can get from that data. Dell Technologies’ Streaming Data Platform provides a smarter foundation for real-time data analysis that supports massive amounts of streaming data through real-time processing and simplified, unified storage. There is a giant wave of data coming soon. Preparing for it today can lift you to new heights tomorrow.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Using the Power of HPC to Save Lives

Dell Technologies helps TGen unravel the secrets of the human genome to fight disease

Dell Technologies and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) have a long history of collaborating to enable groundbreaking research with life-changing results. Located in Phoenix Arizona, TGen is a nonprofit medical research institute affiliated with City of Hope, a world-renowned independent research and treatment center for life-threatening diseases.

TGen leverages multiple Dell Technologies supercomputers to unravel the secrets of the human genome and develop precision medicines for diseases such as COVID and other infectious diseases, cancer, neurological disorders, and rare childhood disorders. TGen uses its supercomputing power to identify more precise and personal treatment options, sooner, to save more lives.

For example, TGen is already running an HPC cluster used primarily for pathogen genomics and is in the process of building a newer system based on Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 Servers with Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Dell EMC Isilon storage and Dell EMC PowerSwitch networking.

TGen and City of Hope also have a GPU-centric system based on Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 and R640 Servers with NVIDIA® V100 GPUs, Dell EMC PowerSwitch networking and Dell EMC Isilon network attached storage that they use primarily for molecular dynamics simulations.

Now, an upgraded HPC system, originally built by TGen, Dell Technologies and Intel in 2012, is enabling TGen to handle the massive quantities of data involved in genome sequencing. Building the system was no small engineering feat, because next-generation sequencing (NGS) typically captures a terabyte or more of data each time a sequencer runs, and TGen runs multiple sequencers run around the clock. TGen needed an HPC system capable of storing, processing and computing against those massive data sets—with a goal of dramatically reducing time to results.

The upgraded supercomputer gives TGen the processing power of 3,000 Intel® Xeon® processing cores, giving researchers 1 million CPU hours per month to perform 50 trillion operations per second. The genomics sequencing system also offers more than 3 petabytes of Dell EMC Isilon scale-out network-attached storage.

The upgrade cuts the data processing time from two weeks to just eight hours. This dramatic performance improvement enables TGen to deliver personalized treatments that save lives, sooner. It’s also helping TGen unravel the secrets of infectious diseases, which are also DNA-based organisms. That’s helping the institute take an active role in the fight against COVID-19. TGen has developed an RNA test for COVID-19 and has been testing local patients since March 2020. The researchers are sequencing all of the positive test results and building a biobank of genetic signatures for the disease over time.

Researchers at TGen can then use the insights gained from sequencing the virus to search for drugs that might be effective against it. As part of this project, TGen can analyze data on the Dell Technologies HPC & AI Innovation Lab’s Zenith supercomputer. As an affiliate of City of Hope, TGen is contributing to the preclinical development of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

According to TGen CIO James Lowey, “Over a number of years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with many people at Dell who are really passionate about what they do and believe in the mission. I think Michael Dell puts it best when he says it’s not just about building technology for technology’s sake. It’s about building technology to solve problems, to work in the real work and to make a difference. That philosophy aligns very closely with what we are trying to do here at TGen. Having a partner who is truly invested in trying to change things for the better is absolutely critical. That’s something we value immensely.”

A new case study outlines the long relationship between TGen and Dell Technologies, as well as the technical details and astounding results of the recent NGS system upgrade and its impact on COVID-19 research.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Hackfest Results in Breakthroughs for Six Scientific Codes

Supercomputing Wales, a consortium of four Welsh universities, is celebrating the results of its first hackathon, a design sprint-like event that brought computer programmers and others together to develop software code and improve performance.

In the three-day event, regional software engineers from across Cardiff, Swansea, Aberystwyth and Bangor Universities, supported by mentors from NVIDIA, Atos and Dell Technologies, achieved performance breakthroughs on six scientific codes:

◉ Hydro 3D an MPI/Fortran code — the repository for Hydro3D, an open source Large Eddy Simulation code

◉ Molpro, a comprehensive system of ab initio programs for advanced molecular electronic structure calculations

◉ Darknet, an open source neural network framework written in C and CUDA for CPU and GPU computation

◉ HiREP, a set of programs for performing calculations in the framework of Lattice Gauge Theory, a superset of lattice QCD

◉ Maxwell NEFEM, Fortran, MPI, potentially looking to port to GPU

◉ Sombrero, a benchmarking utility for high performance computing based on lattice field theory applications.

The code hackathon, organized by Dell Technologies and hosted at Swansea University, was part of the Atos – Dell Community Benefits plan for Supercomputing Wales, which promotes University collaboration with the industry.

The mentors from NVIDIA, Atos and Dell Technologies were introduced to fine-tune the initial plan, creating reference material for Regional Software Engineers (RSEs) at Supercomputing Wales to review ahead of the event. The RSEs, in turn, defined code performance objectives, including an As-Is and To-Be model.

The first day’s activity commenced with early profiling of the codes and discussion between the RSEs and Mentors to agree on a plan for performance improvement. The teams huddled at the end of each day to present code improvements and challenges and to share best practices.

In addition to the multiple networking and discussion opportunities among the RSE and Mentors, the activity boosted code performance, enabling Supercomputing Wales to achieve greater ROI on the current infrastructure. 

A Centre of Excellence (CoE)

The hackathon drew on the resources of the Supercomputing Centre of Excellence at the heart of the Supercomputing Wales initiative. This CoE, spearheaded by Atos and Dell Technologies, provides Welsh researchers with a full suite of leading-edge HPC equipment, software and services. The centre provides two supercomputer systems, two Atos BullSequana S Datalake appliances, and on-demand cloud-based supercomputing simulation and services powered by Extreme Factory, HPC on-demand from Atos.

With the HPC systems and expertise of Supercomputing Wales and the Atos Dell Technologies Supercomputing CoE, researchers across Wales have access to the resources they need to simulate and solve complex scientific problems — and keep the nation of Wales at the forefront of theoretical science and technical innovation.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Accelerating Dell Technologies Supercomputing With New NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand Interconnects

Discovery and innovation have always started with great minds dreaming big, and this is very much the case today. As data analytics, high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) continue to converge and evolve, they are fueling the next industrial revolution and the next quantum leap in human progress. And with the help of increasingly powerful technology, we can all dream even bigger.

Lightning-fast networks are a key enabler of this ongoing push to take things to a higher level. Whether it’s a quest to find new galaxies, discover new forms of energy or design vehicles that drive themselves, we need low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects that can keep pace with the speed of today’s ever-growing data processing and storage needs. Anything less can impede system performance and slow the path to discovery and innovation.

The quest for faster networking performance drove the rise of InfiniBand technology for server-side connectivity in HPC shops, hyperscale data centers and AI environments. The unique characteristics of InfiniBand break through the networking roadblocks in system architectures to deliver a better balance of processor performance, memory bandwidth and I/O performance. And in a parallel trend, Dell Technologies and other networking providers are delivering solutions that put more processing power in smart network interface controllers (NICs), switches and routers to automate network functions and accelerate system performance.

And this brings us to the news of the day — the announcement of the 7th generation of the NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand architecture. This high-speed, extreme low-latency and high-density InfiniBand interconnect delivers the scalability and feature-rich technology needed for today’s supercomputers, AI applications and hyperscale cloud data centers.

NVIDIA reports that this new generation of Mellanox InfiniBand sets world records for high performance networking, delivering 2X higher bandwidth per port (400Gb/s), 3X higher switch silicon port density, 5X higher switch system capacity and 32X higher AI acceleration power.

The Mellanox InfiniBand architecture continues to enhance and extend NVIDIA In-Network Computing technologies, including pre-configured and programmable compute engines such as NVIDIA Mellanox Scalable Hierarchical Aggregation and Reduction Protocol (SHARP)™, MPI tag matching and MPI All-to-All and programmable cores. NVIDIA says it adds up to the best cost per node and the best return on investment.

We look forward to incorporating these latest InfiniBand capabilities into our HPC/AI systems. Advances like these that enable our customers to detect cancer in MRI images using AI models, make billions of AI-driven content recommendations without human involvement, and unlock the secrets of dark matter and other mysteries of our universe.

This is all keeping in spirit with the Dell Technologies commitment to developing technologies that power human progress and transform lives. And that’s just what is happening today, as we at Dell Technologies work with our partners to bring the latest innovations to data-driven organizations.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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The Finer (Floating) Points of Accelerating HPC

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 and AMD Instinct MI100

The drive for advancing research in high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) has sped the demand for computation at an exponential rate. Performance of HPC systems is more than doubling every two years while performance required to train AI models is doubling every 3-4 months

In addition to the advancement of processor technology, architectural enhancements and compute accelerators are becoming the norm to meet the growing computational demands of HPC and AI. Specialized architectures and accelerators can help speed up application-specific core arithmetic operations such as floating-point multiply add and accumulate, vector and matrix operations that take up much of the execution cycles for HPC and AI workloads.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525

.Several industries need these advanced HPC capabilities. Data analytics, such as Reverse Time Migration used in the Oil and Gas industry, require accelerated computing to solve the massive IOPS challenges. Private and government research companies require dense compute and GPU capabilities to run complex simulations that must resolve the complications of chaos theory. Academia leverages GPUs to accelerate virus simulations, genomics research, and quantum physics workloads. Modern GPUs are extending their capabilities to efficiently run as a compute co-processor for HPC and AI workloads with inclusion of hardware support for a variety of numerical precision and increased memory bandwidth. The AMD Instinct MI100 is the latest entry into the compute accelerator arena delivering compelling performance coupled with a flexible and open software ecosystem.

Dell has teamed with AMD to bring you the PowerEdge R7525 with AMD Instinct MI100. This combination enables faster scientific discoveries by speeding up simulations and time to insight, using complex deep learning models for your most compute intensive use cases. The AMD Instinct MI100 uses the new AMD CDNA (Compute DNA) with all-new Matrix Core Technology to deliver a nearly 7x (FP16) performance boost for AI workloads vs AMD prior Gen. Scientific applications will benefit from MI100’s single-precision FP32 Matrix Core performance for a nearly 3.5x boost for HPC & AI workloads vs AMD prior gen. Leading AI researchers can leverage MI100’s support for newer machine learning  operations like bfloat16 to help reduce training time from weeks and days to hours on the PowerEdge R7525.

AMD Instinct MI100

This collaboration brings amazing hardware together to increase the performance of your HPC workloads. The R7525 with MI100 leverages PCIe Gen4 capability, ideal for bandwidth intensive HPC applications where there is lot of data movement over PCIe bus. These performance boosts lead to faster solution times, more efficient resource utilization, and more seamless HPC scaling.

The MI100 brings more to the table than just 2x the amount of processing density compared to previous gen of AMD products, but it also complements the other components within the R7525. By itself, the MI100 delivers:

1. The world’s fastest HPC accelerator, with up to 11.5 TFLOPs peak double precision (FP64) performance

2. Nearly 3.5x (FP32) matrix performance for HPC and nearly 7x (FP16) performance boost for AI workloads vs AMD prior generations

The new AMD Infinity Architecture connects three MI100s inside the R7525over PCIe® Gen4. Higher bandwidth and lower latencies due to PCIe Gen4 over Gen3 improves the utilization of GPUs, making HPC workloads run more efficiently.

Further, AMD’s ROCm open software allows you to use different compute languages and move that across compute platforms. This is an open and portable ecosystem supporting multi-architectures, including GPUs from other vendors. AMD also added a tool called Hipify which enables code written in native CUDA to be easily converted to the AMD ROCm HIP programming model with minimal post tuning or optimization needed.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Durham University Puts New SmartNIC to the Test

NVIDIA BlueField-2 in use at Durham University

As a group, HPC practitioners are on the cutting edge of innovation, and are always willing to push the boundaries of performance to get to the next big breakthrough. For example, Dell Technologies customer Durham University is a leading research institution in the fields of astrophysics and particle physics. The University is using BlueField-2 DPUs to enable direct access to remote memory and improve the performance of massively parallel codes, which they believe may pave the way for future exascale systems.

The Durham University team has been using the half-height, half-width NVIDIA BlueField-2 SmartNIC cards in their “Durham Intelligent NIC Environment” (DINE), a 16-node supercomputer powered by Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 servers. Each card is then connected with a 25G Ethernet cable, and configured to operate in a “host-separated” mode, providing direct access to the Arm cores on the DPU. Researchers can then launch HPC MPI codes across the cluster making use of both the AMD® EPYC™ server processors, and the Arm processors on the DPUs.

To test the DPU technology, the Durham team decided to compile two versions of their code—one that executes on the server processors, and one that executes on the DPU Arm cores. The team reported that recompiling the code for the Arm cores took seconds, while installing the necessary libraries took longer. However, they believe this will be faster in the future now that they have a recipe for the process. When they run a job across the DINE cluster, they direct MPI jobs to run on the DPUs instead of the CPUs, which allows the CPUs to carry on with their tasks without MPI interruptions.

The team believes the technology has the potential to become mainstream. Their faculty, staff, students, collaborators and other fundamental researchers will benefit from working with cutting-edge technologies that help them design algorithms and investigate ideas which will help redefine the future of HPC for facilities around the world.

Tobias Wienzieri, Project Principal Investigator (PI) for DINE said, “We have been suffering from a lack of MPI progress and, hence, algorithmic latency for quite a while and invested significant compute effort to decide how to place our tasks on the system. We hope that BlueField will help us to realize these two things way more efficiently. Actually, we started to write software that does this for us on BlueField.”

Based on the results at Durham University, the new NVIDIA SmartNICs with BlueFiled-2 DPUs are one step further on the journey to the infrastructure-as-code data center, where users can send a job out and have it run where it’s most optimized for performance and efficiency.

Ever increasing data drives the need for advanced computing innovations

As data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and High Performance Computing (HPC) converge and mainstream, they’re driving new innovations designed to feed insatiable demands for compute performance. Accelerators—such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)—have revolutionized advanced computing over the last few decades, by offloading certain tasks from the CPU to speed workloads by several orders of magnitude compared to CPUs alone.

However, once Ethernet reaches 10 GB/s, the network interface card (NIC) starts to become the bottleneck, sapping cycles from the processor to handle increasingly complex system and data center networks. For example, when message passing interface (MPI) traffic is running on the CPU, HPC threads have to wait their turn, wasting compute cycles and slowing workload performance.

To counter this performance drain, the industry has been pushing the boundaries of software-defined networking (SDN), making the NIC smarter so that it can take over some of the processing functions that can slow down the CPU.

NVIDIA announces the SmartNIC, powered by NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU

After acquiring networking powerhouse Mellanox in April of this year, NVIDIA began leading the charge on novel SDN technologies by announcing the NVIDIA® Mellanox® ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC. The SmartNIC is powered by the new NVIDIA BlueField technology, a high-performance, software programmable, multi-core system on a chip (SOC) CPU based on the Arm processing architecture.

The BlueField-2 Data Processing Unit (DPU) offloads critical network, security, and storage tasks from the CPU to boost performance, networking efficiency and security. With the BlueField-2 DPU enabled SmartNIC, the full infrastructure stack—compute, storage and networking—can be more granularly software-defined and disaggregated to handle larger volumes of data faster and more efficiently.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Endorsed by Sheltered Harbor

A Key Milestone in the Protection of Critical Financial Data from Cyber Threats Like Ransomware

Today, Dell Technologies is announcing that Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Solution for Sheltered Harbor is the first solution to earn a product endorsement from Sheltered Harbor, a non-profit, finance industry-led initiative to enhance financial sector stability and resiliency. The endorsement represents another important milestone for our leading Cyber Recovery offering and is the culmination of two years of working alongside the Sheltered Harbor team to develop this solution for Financial Services organizations.

Unfortunately, throughout 2020 we have seen cyberattacks grow in sophistication and financial, operational and reputational damage. Today, ransomware attacks threaten organizations of every size, industry and geography.

According to Sophos, over half of organizations worldwide report being hit by a ransomware attack during the prior year, with attacks successfully encrypting data 73% of the time. The average cost of remediation was almost $1M per attack for organizations with 1,000 to 5,000 employees. And criminals are working to take advantage of shifts in IT caused by the pandemic, with the FBI noting a 400% increase in attacks since its start.

As a leader in end-to-end security, Dell Technologies has been a driving force behind cyber resilience and products, solutions and services that offer the best protection against the sophisticated this explosion of cybercrime. We saw the need to develop modern data protection solutions that protected our customers’ most asset – their data, from these attacks. We believe Cyber Recovery represents that paradigm shift in how critical data is protected from a full spectrum of cyber threats from basic ransomware to insider attacks and beyond.

Our PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution protects the most critical data in a vault environment – and is doing so for hundreds of customers across all geographies and industries. The vault is ideally physically isolated – a locked cage or room – and is always logically isolated via an operational air gap. The vault components are never accessible from production, and access to the vault target – when the air gap is unlocked – is extremely limited.

In parallel, the US Financial Industry founded Sheltered Harbor in 2015 to help it solve a similar, but more focused issue – how to protect public confidence in the U.S. financial sector if a devastating event like a cyber-attack causes a financial institution’s critical systems, and their backups, to fail, thereby limiting its ability to continue to service its customers.

“Sheltered Harbor and Dell Technologies together are dedicated to the safety and stability of the financial sector,” said Carlos Recalde, President and COO of Sheltered Harbor. “PowerProtect Cyber Recovery is a solid option for any financial institution looking to preserve their critical data sets and ensure its rapid recovery, in accordance with Sheltered Harbor’s resiliency standards.

What does the Sheltered Harbor endorsement and relationship mean for customers?

If your organization is a Sheltered Harbor participant, or eligible to be a participant, you can now purchase and quickly deploy a turnkey data vault that meets all of the stringent Sheltered Harbor criteria. Contrast this with the time, effort and complexity of building a custom solution that meets the Sheltered Harbor criteria. Using PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Sheltered Harbor can shorten the deployment process to weeks, provide a stable and operational platform – and prepare you to vault other critical data. You just add capacity, everything else is already in place.

If your organization is not part of the Sheltered Harbor community, you can deploy PowerProtect Cyber Recovery and protect your organization’s data using the same capabilities and technologies providing the foundation which meets the stringent Sheltered Harbor standards.

The Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Solution for Sheltered Harbor helps participants achieve compliance with data vaulting standards and certification, plan for operational resilience and recovery, and protect critical data into the next Data Decade. Consider it your shelter from the potential storm of cyber-attack.

Dell Technologies is proud to be an early and committed member of Sheltered Harbor, and this announcement further illustrates Dell Technologies’ leadership and commitment to improve data protection and cyber resilience for global organizations, governments and critical infrastructure.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Do You Need a Certification to Become a Data Scientist? Things You Should Consider

The Dell EMC Big Data Analytics Certifications are the top-billed Data Scientist credentials internationally for today’s market researchers, business graduates, and marketers seeking to enter or accelerate their growth in the highly lucrative Big Data Analytics profession.

The Big Data Analyst credentialing track of the Data Science credentialing terms of trained professionals who specialize in handling the entire life–cycle of analyzing Big Data using advanced analytics tools and techniques on common and popular Big Data software and platforms.

The badge identifies the achievement of the Dell Technologies Proven Professional Specialist - Data Scientist, Advanced Analytics certification. Earners know analytical methods, Hadoop and Pig, Hive, HBase, Social Network Analysis, Natural Language Processing, and Visualization methods. These methods give the data scientist the ability to identify and communicate conclusions and recommendations to solve business challenges across many domains.

Do You Want to Become a Data Scientist?

Certainly, Data Science had become a glamorous role over the years, mainly when HBR termed the data scientist's position as the sexiest job of the 21st century. Today, data science's market size stands at $38 billion and is anticipated to reach $140 billion by 2025! It is undeniably a high growth role.

The majority of enthusiasts aim to become a data scientist because of the glamour and high salary band, but this is no longer the reality. Many people apply for the same job role but do not have the right skill set for the job, following in a crunch of high expectations.

For example, come from the software engineering industry. Data engineering may be the right role for you, or if you need a job with a high number of openings, you may want to go with Business analytics as a career choice.

What Are the Many Paths to Become a Data Scientist?

There is no limitation in learning, especially in the digital age, where you have an ample amount of options open! You can scan through millions of freely available resources or even pay a hefty amount for a shining course. It all depends on how you require to do it.

1. Reading Blogs on Data Scientist:

Blogs are widely and readily available resources on the internet. The most significant benefit of blogs is that there is a lot of variety in it, and they are easy to grasp. You do not require to go chapter-wise to reach a specific topic.

2. Learning Through Video Tutorials:

Videos tutorials are an excellent option for you. It is always better to see someone achieve the concept, code, or project in front of you and then repeat after them. The drawback is when you are a beginner, and it becomes hard to attach the dots with the overall case leading to gaps in knowledge.

3. Free Courses for Data Scientist:

These are ordinarily short introductory courses that you can search for as a beginner. Many of them also provide certification. The benefit of such classes is that you get the comprehensive learning path for the proposed concept. The disadvantage is that these are not specific programs and only consist of general knowledge.

4. Data Science Certification Courses:

Data Science Certification courses give a great way to learn data science. You get a full curriculum and reach the aim in a structured approach. Industry experts usually teach these with high-quality content. There is no particular disadvantage of the program, the only one being - you require to keep the Data Science certification course wisely.

Concluding

As the demand for data science professionals is growing, recruiters face a challenge around the world. This challenge is of hiring potential candidates who have all the required skills. More satisfaction is needed at the end of recruiters and hiring managers as they know the challenge to recognize the knowledge and skills in a few hours of the interview. For this reason, a person who is having a professional certification gets more weightage at the time of consideration.

A data scientist's job is challenging, exciting, and crucial to an organization’s success. So, it is no wonder that there is a rush to enroll in a Data Science course to be eligible for the job. But, while you are at it, you also need to have the awareness regarding the job responsibilities usually bestowed upon the data scientists in a business organization, and you would be surprised to learn that the duties of a data scientist differ from that of a data analyst or, a data engineer.

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Celebrate STEM/STEAM Day with VxRail

What do VxRail and STEM/STEAM curriculum have in common? They both break down silos. VxRail breaks down operational silos within the data center. STEM curriculum integrates Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics into multi-disciplinary educational projects with real world applications. STEM becomes STEAM by incorporating art and creative thinking as subjective counterbalances to what are traditionally objective fields of study. As the pace of global innovation continues to accelerate,  STEM/STEAM curriculum seeks to address a unique challenge facing our children and educators: How do we prepare young people for jobs which may not yet even exist?  

Dell Technologies recognizes the impact this curriculum can have in preparing today’s youth for tomorrow’s workforce and has donated over $70 million to STEM initiatives since 2014. A great example is our partnership with Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization working to support and increase the number of women in computer science by equipping young women of diverse backgrounds with the necessary computing skills to pursue 21st century career opportunities.  

STEM/STEAM Day is Sunday, November 8, and it’s a great opportunity to encourage children of all ages to get curious about the world around them. While the day is focused on children’s educational development, children are not the only demographic that benefits from continued learning. They are also not the only ones who want to learn in fun and engaging ways.  

Dell Technologies believes in leveraging technology to help make  complicated things simple. We strive to make complex stories easy to understand and share, and to drive creativity and innovation among our audiences. Just in time for STEM/STEAM Day, Dell Technologies has published a pair of apps for iOS and Android devices that provide a surprisingly fun way to explore data center infrastructure!

Infrastructure AR is an augmented reality (AR) experience that delivers an immersive tour of the hardware and software that differentiate VxRail. The app launches an interactive hologram right from your phone or tablet that looks and feels real. Within are 13 interactive animated modules to explore—and it truly is an exploration. The AR platform creates an environment in which the user is invited to discover VxRail and the value it delivers in a fun and exciting way.   

Speaking of fun, Data Center Sim is a mobile game which puts the player in charge of a data center. She is tasked with balancing budget, staffing, and capacity in order to address the needs of the business. Three-tier or hyperconverged—the decisions made will determine the success and growth of the business and– most importantly– the customer satisfaction score! All the while, the player is learning about data center administration and infrastructure. 

When someone’s imagination is captured, breakthroughs are possible. And the younger someone is when they experience technology (or science, engineering, art, or math) that moves them, the more impactful it can be. While younger audiences may not be ready for some of the technical content within these apps, the experiences themselves serve as conduits through which new opportunities can be glimpsed. 

On a personal note, as a result of Infrastructure AR, my own daughter has developed an interest in augmented reality that I anticipate will only continue to expand as she grows. And it is in this spirit that I am excited to share these apps as part of my own participation in STEM/STEAM day.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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From On-Prem to the Edge: Making AI a Reality

MLPerf is an industry consortium established for Machine Learning (ML)/Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution benchmarking and best practices. MLPerf benchmarks enable fair comparison of the training and inference performance of ML/AL hardware, software and algorithms/models.

MLPerf Training measures how fast a system can train machine learning models. This includes image classification, lightweight and heavy-weight object detection, language translation, natural language processing, recommendation and reinforcement learning, each with specific datasets, quality targets and reference implementation models. You can read about the latest Dell MLPerf training performance in my previous blog.

The MLPerf Inference suite measures how quickly a trained neural network can evaluate new data and perform forecasting or classification for a wide range of applications. MLPerf Inference includes image classification, object detection and machine translation with specific models, datasets, quality, server latency and multi-stream latency constraints. MLPerf validated and published results for MLPerf Inference v0.7 on October 21, 2020. While all training happens in the data center, Inference is more geographically dispersed. To ensure coverage of all cases, MLPerf is further categorized into a datacenter and edge division.

Dell EMC had a total of 210 submissions for MLPerf Inference v0.7 in the data center category using various Dell EMC platforms and accelerators from leading vendors. We achieved impressive results when compared to other submissions in the same class of platforms.  A few of the highlights is are captured below.

Dell EMC portfolio meets customers’ inference needs from on-premises to the edge

◉ Dell EMC is the only vendor with submissions on a variety of inference solutions – leveraging GPU, FPGA and CPUs in the datacenter/private cloud and Edge.

◉ Dell is also the only vendor to submit results on virtualized infrastructure with vCPUs and NVIDIA virtual GPUs (vGPU) on VMware vSphere. Datacenter operators can leverage virtualization benefits of cloning, vMotion, distributed resource scheduling, suspend/resume of VMs with NVIDIA vGPU technology for their accelerated AI workloads.

◉ The breadth of solutions and performance leadership across multiple categories make it crystal clear that we enable our customers to be on the fast track for their inference needs from on-premises datacenter to edge AI infrastructure.

We’re proud of what we’ve done, but it’s still all about helping customers adopt AI. By sharing our expertise and providing guidance on infrastructure for AI, Dell EMC helps customers become successful and get their use case into production.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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The Journey to As-a-Service

Simplicity. That’s the overwhelming need I’ve heard across conversations with customers, partners and analysts over the past several months which was echoed last week during Dell Technologies World Experience. And it’s no wonder – responding to COVID forced organizations to scale infrastructure overnight and accelerate their digital transformation. This rapid adoption of new technologies has uncovered a lot of complexity in how organizations budget for, consume and manage IT, and it has also led to increased interest in on-demand consumption models. In the past year alone, we’ve seen nearly 50% year-over-year growth in the customer base for our flexible consumption and as-a-Service offerings as of the most recent quarter. That’s why I couldn’t be more excited about our announcement of Project APEX, which brings together our as-a-Service and cloud strategy, offerings and go-to-market under a single effort to radically simplify how our customers consume and deliver IT services.

Project APEX builds upon a rich history of giving customers the flexibility and freedom to scale their IT to their business requirements and budgets. In other words, we’ve been on this journey to delivering on-demand IT for decades – we’ve been offering flexible payment solutions through Dell Financial Services for 23 years and managed utility services for 15 years. And last year, we launched Dell Technologies On Demand (DTOD), the industry’s broadest end-to-end portfolio of flexible consumption and as-a-Service solutions aimed at providing organizations the flexibility of cloud with the performance and security of on-prem infrastructure. Since then, we’ve worked continuously to expand DTOD offerings and further simplify the as-a-Service experience for our customers. And we’ve helped our customers and partners fund their critical technology needs through the Payment Flexibility Program, which we are now extending through January 29, 2021.

At Dell Technologies World, we introduced Pre-Approved Pricing for Flex On Demand, making it simpler and faster to order our most popular configurations with a pay-as-you-use pricing model. These configurations include everything organizations need to get started – hardware, system software, essential deployment and support services – and offer baseline pricing, based on real-world numbers, so customers can align the best financial option with their objectives.

In addition, we’ve extended Flex On Demand to cover Dell EMC PowerEdge servers powered by AMD as well as Dell EMC PowerFlex software-defined storage, rounding out its availability on our Power portfolio, including PowerScale and PowerStore. Flex On Demand is also available through our Dell Tech partners, and we are enhancing their ability to earn program benefits with Flex On Demand by increasing our partner incentives. Dell Tech partners can earn a 20% incentive for Flex On Demand on the committed contact value (CCV) of storage, HCI, CI, and Data Protection solutions and a 10 percent front-end incentive on servers. These new incentives are available globally in all locations Flex On Demand is available.**

We’re helping organizations across the globe better predict and manage costs while gaining the agility and flexibility to scale capacity up or down. For example, a large multinational institution we work with to service their enterprise-scale private cloud implementation and storage as-a-service managed utility is seeing incredible results – they’ve achieved 50% more compute power at eight percent less cost, while reducing time to provision date by more than 90%. We’re helping a U.S. state’s department of IT shift to an as-a-Service model, transforming how their infrastructure is managed and consumed so they can avoid overprovisioning storage and compute resources while quickly delivering IT services to stakeholders across the state.

We are making huge strides in our journey to delivering cloud-like, as-a-Service experiences across the full Dell Technologies portfolio. We’ve drastically simplified our customers’ ability to get on-premises cloud resources up and running quickly with the introduction of instance-based offerings for Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. We’re delivering a truly consistent self-service experience for cloud and as-a-Service workloads through a single web interface with Dell Technologies Cloud Console. All of these exciting announcements will propel our vision for Project APEX, bringing together the simplicity, choice and consistency organizations need to deliver IT as a Service and be ready for what’s next.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Giving Computers a Voice

How HPC enables natural language processing—and what you can do with it

Natural language processing (NLP) is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables a computer to understand, interpret, and use spoken or written human language. For example, NLP can be used to translate communications from one language to another, convert voice to text and vice versa, and even give chatbots the ability to have human-like conversations that help people get quick responses to questions and concerns.

The field of NLP has recently been transformed by the use of neural networks and deep learning, enabled by advances in High performance Computing (HPC). It’s now possible to build AIs that can interact with people more naturally than ever before. And first-movers are already incorporating NLP into a wide range of processes.

To help you capitalize on this trend, Dell Technologies has an active research program focused on helping interested parties explore, develop and adopt natural language processing applications. This research is carried out by a data sciences team at the Dell Technologies HPC & AI Innovation Lab in Austin, Texas.

For example, data scientists at the lab are working to solve key problems associated with translating from one human language to another. Our research indicates that training models for language-to-language translation could be scaled to an extreme level, allowing models to be trained at a much faster pace and at a much larger scale without breaking the current state of the art.

In another example, the team undertook to convert text to a human-sounding voice. Our neural networks have been able to transform voice synthesis, replacing artificial sounding “robot speak” with smooth, natural voices. The scale-out parallelism and acceleration made possible by HPC systems at the lab is driving down the time to create these voice models from months to hours, turning the dream of conversational computers into a reality even faster.

Natural language processing is a powerful tool for organizations to streamline their interactions with customers, employees, partners and others. To help you capitalize on this opportunity, researchers in the Dell Technologies HPC & AI Innovation Lab are working to advance the technologies and methodologies for the development of language-to-language translation and text-to-voice translation applications. We’re excited to share our learnings, insights and best practices for NLP using high performance computing and artificial intelligence.

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