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4 DELL EMC HPC Solution for Life Sciences v1.1: Deployment Best Practices | Document ID | version (optional)
1 Introduction
Dell HPC Solution for Life Sciences is a pre-integrated, tested, tuned and purpose-built platform, leveraging
the most relevant of Dell’s High Performance Computing line of products and best-in-class partner products
due to the high diversity in life sciences applications. It encompasses all the hardware resources required for
various life sciences data analysis while providing an optimal balance of compute density, energy efficiency,
and performance from Enterprise server line-up of Dell.
Dell HPC solution for Life Sciences v1.1 provides higher flexibility for the solutions. A platform is available in
five variants, depending on the cluster interconnects selected, which can be either 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE),
Intel® Omni-Path (OPA), InfiniBand® (IB) EDR or IB FDR. In this version, the following options are available:
• PowerEdge C6320 compute subsystem with Intel® OPA fabric
• PowerEdge C6320 compute subsystem with IB EDR fabric
• PowerEdge C6320 compute subsystem with 10 GigE fabric
• PowerEdge FX2 compute subsystem with IB FDR fabric
• PowerEdge FX2 compute subsystem with 10 GigE fabric
The solutions are nearly identical for IB, Intel® OPA and 10 GigE versions, except for a couple of changes in
the switching infrastructure and network adapters. These differences are outlined in Network Components
section. The solution ships in a deep 48U rack enclosure, which was chosen because of its ease of mounting
PDUs and for effortless cable management. This rack houses the compute, storage, and networking modules
of the solution. Also, there are software modules which deploy, manage, and maintain the cluster.
This deployment guide describes the PowerEdge C6320 compute subsystem with Intel® OPA solution for
diverse life sciences applications including molecular dynamics simulation solution into the flexible
architecture as well as improving the performance of genomics data analysis platform.