November 2008 - Direct2Dell

Michael Dell this morning addressed attendees of the SC08 conference and spoke of the 'fourth wave' of supercomputing where powerful HPC-based clusters will be used by organizations of all sizes to solve complex compute problems.

SC08 is taking place in Dell's backyard in Austin, Texas, and Dell is taking the opportunity to show the gathering of some of the world's most prestigious scientists, engineers, programmers, researches and educators Dell's engineering prowess when it comes to high performance computing.

In his keynote, Michael spoke of how supercomputing was previously reserved only for those who could afford it - a trait traceable back to the beginning of supercomputing. In the 1970s, the first wave of supercomputing was dominated by specialized processors and proprietary operating systems. The second wave in the 80s and 90s was more focused on advancements in microprocessor-based systems. The third wave showed an increase in the percentage of HPC clusters in the Top 500 list. And finally, we're now entering a new period of high-performance computing that’s defined by further standardization across the HPC ecosystem. This “fourth wave” will make powerful HPC clusters accessible for the first time to more organizations, large and small, worldwide.

Here's what Dell announced during SC08:

-- Dell, Intel and Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) jointly announced the availability of LLNL's Hyperion cluster for use by the HPC community.

-- The Texas Advanced Computing Center's (TACC) Dell Stallion virtualization cluster will be the largest in the world comprising 45 Dell 30-inch flat panel monitors (307 million pixels) powered by Dell XPS desktop gaming systems.

-- Michael also discussed the new NVIDIA GPU that will soon be available in Dell Precision workstations.

Dell had numerous HPCC demonstrations during the show in its large booth and had a number of speakers that presented papers on a variety of topics. The show runs through Thursday of this week.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Reza Rooholamini from Dell's Clustering and Solutions Group about the latest trends in supercomputing. I've known Reza since I first joined the company in 1999, when Dell was first beginning its foray into the high performance clustering business. Back then, x86-based systems were a rarity on the Top500 list and our presence started with just a 64-node cluster at the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing. Each node on that system had a quad Pentium 3 Xeon that ran at 500Mhz running Windows NT.

Today, the Top500 list features more than 400 x86-based systems and we are seeing the same peak performance that was previously only possible on a supercomputer now available on a mobile workstation.

Let's hear what Reza has to say about the state of high performance computing.

I recently published a post about registration coming to blogs, since it was functionality we never had when we launched the blog in July 2006. Today, we’re taking that a step further to allow tighter integration between community and Dell.com.

For a lot of big companies, the web is about e-commerce. Today, even though more companies are engaging customers through social media, community tends to be on one side, while e-commerce is on the other. Lots of folks within Dell don’t think it should be that way… and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been a big proponent of Jeremiah Owyang’s concept of the Irrelevant Corporate Website.

Feedback from the community like this idea from IdeaStorm user winoffice makes it pretty clear: people hate maintaining multiple logins. That’s a core reason why we’re implementing something called single sign on. At its core, it’s a pretty simple thing: your Dell.com account and your Dell Community account become one. This linkage means you can navigate seamlessly between Dell.com and the Dell community site.

Right now, single sign on applies to content on the new Dell Community site (blogs, forums, wikis, groups and galleries) and Dell.com. It’s also worth noting that both IdeaStorm and OpenID integration is on the roadmap.

So, here’s how the process works: if you have an existing My Account for Dell.com and an existing community account, you’ll need to associate them together. If you only have one or neither, don’t worry. The process should be pretty easy and take less than a minute.

Update: Community member PudgyOne recently let me know that some customers were using their e-mail address as their community user name. Please do not do this. Please choose a unique user name that is different from your e-mail address. This is important because whatever you choose as your user name will be viewable to the public. This also means that you may be susceptible to spam.

 Note: While we are introducing the technology to Dell's website, there will be about a four to six hour window where customers cannot create a new account. Click on the image below to see a larger version of the image.

Once your accounts are associated, you’re good to go and will use your e-mail address to login into community from now on. Your user name will be displayed when you post or comment anywhere on the Dell Community.

For more details, take a look at this wiki article. If you have questions or issues with the process, please let me know in the comments section.

If you own an XPS machine, or a Dell Precision workstation, it should be a little easier to find appropriate drivers for your system because we recently added global functionality on support.dell.com that limits the drivers listed to the ones that are applicable to your configuration.

We started rolling out this functionality back in July for some Inspiron laptops. Then in October, we expanded it to several lines of products including Inspiron, Latitude, Optiplex, Dimension, Vostro and Studio systems.

Though we might have been a bit too late to help customers like Neville Hobson out, hopefully this will be useful to other XPS or Dell Precision workstation customers who need to update a driver or two over the holidays.

With the holidays about to get into full swing, today we’re unveiling a new group called Gift Rap. It’s no surprise that a lot of folks are looking to buy technology for loved ones this time of year. And for many of those customers that means lots of questions… how in the heck do you make sense of all the options that are in front of you?

 With Gift Rap, we’ve worked to put all the resources you need in one place. Think of it as a place where you can get the answers to all kind of technology topics from Dell employees and community members alike.

What are the must-have gadgets this year? Do you need a desktop or a notebook? How much RAM or hard drive space makes sense? What hardware matters if you’re buying a PC for editing videos? What about a decent gaming machine that doesn’t cost big bucks? Those are just a few of the kinds of discussions you can expect to find there.

You’ll hear from Dell experts as you would expect, but we’ll also be featuring content from Walmart’s Elevenmoms community to give you helpful perspective. Most importantly though, Gift Rap is a place where you can have discussions with other customers who are part of the Dell community.

Beyond discussions, you’ll see holiday-related articles from third-party sites that may be of interest. Of course, the latest deals from Dell will always be a click away. And we’ll tweet a little bit of everything from www.twitter.com/DellGiftRap.

So, how do you get started? If you haven’t registered to be part of the Dell Community, that’s the first step. From there, you can click on the Groups section and look for the gift logo just like the one featured at the top of this post.

From there, click on the blue button like the one in the image below to join the group and that should be it.

We made an exciting announcement this morning that expands recycling options for our customers.  Beginning today, any Dell-branded equipment can be dropped off for recycling at any of 1500 Staples stores in the United States for free recycling.   Staples is the first and only national retailer to offer Dell customers an everyday, free drop-off recycling option for their technology products. This program is one of the largest on-going computer recycling programs to be launched in the United States.

Dell and Staples have both been leaders in providing convenient and responsible computer recycling options. Our combined efforts in providing another free recycling option for Dell equipment will help to continue increasing the amount of equipment collected for responsible recycling.

We encourage all consumers who have used computer equipment they no longer need to recycle or donate it.  You can find a Staples store here to take advantage of this new program.  Dell will also continue to offer our free home pick-up recycling program and the Dell-Goodwill Reconnect program in several markets.  That combined with our free donation service managed with the National Cristina Foundation gives an unprecedented number of recycling opportunities.