Dell Technologies today announced three expanded offerings in conjunction with the start of the ISC21 digital conference. The centerpiece is Omnia, new software underpinning workload deployment and management and ‘composable infrastructure’ capabilities. Also announced were expanded HPC-on-demand services and server GPU options.

“Omnia is an open source set of Ansible playbooks developed by Dell Technologies, our HPC and AI innovation team, in partnership with contributions from Intel and the HPC community. It’s all about simplifying and easing the deployment and the management of high performance clusters [but] not just for HPC, but also for AI and data analytics workloads,” said Caitlin Gordon, vice president, product management, Dell, in a media/analyst pre-briefing.

“It will put the right software on each server based on your use case whether it’s HPC simulations [or] neural networks for AI and reduce your time to time deployments. One of the coolest things about Omnia is that you can compose and recompose the stack based on what you need, really taking an infrastructure as code approach here.”

Dell also introduced an expanded “pay-as-you-go” HPC on demand offering for hybrid clouds that’s s now available with VMware. “What we’re adding here is support for VMware, which gives us the ability to not only leverage and offer HPC on demand in a single tenant environment, but also multi-tenant environment. And that’s specifically combining VMware and our partnership with R systems,” said Gordon.

Dell cited one example of an HPC-on-demand user:

“Mercury Marine, a leader in marine propulsion systems, uses computer-aided hydrodynamic simulations for new designs that often require HPC power surpassing their in- house capabilities. With access to Dell’s high performance infrastructure, Mercury Marine’s engineers can cut simulation time from 48 hours in-house to only two hours with HPC on demand.

“We’ve got a base level of computational availability on hand that we own, and, now with HPC on demand, we’re able to run simulations and workloads that just wouldn’t be possible on our existing infrastructure,” said Arden Anderson, engineer simulation specialist, Mercury Maritime. “With Dell Technologies and R Systems, we’re able to handle more complex workloads and simulations in far less time.”

Lastly, Dell announced new GPU options for PowerEdge servers introduced early in the year.  “We announced a whole new generation of PowerEdge servers earlier this year [and have] new GPU options available in three of those models,” said Gordon. Dell Technologies now offers Nvidia A30 and A10 Tensor Core GPUs as options for Dell EMC PowerEdge R750, R750xa and R7525 servers.

As described in the official announcement, “The A30 GPUs support a broad range of AI inference and mainstream enterprise compute workloads, such as conversational AI and computer vision. With A10 GPUs, users can support mixed AI and graphics workloads on a common infrastructure, ideal for deep learning inference and computer-aided design. Nvidia virtual GPU software, virtual desktops used by designers, engineers, artists and scientists automatically run at peak performance.”