>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. We are live at MWC 23. This is day two of our coverage, we're giving you four days of coverage, but you already know that because you were here yesterday. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Dave this show is massive. I was walking in this morning and almost getting claustrophobic with the 80,000 people that are joining us. There is, seems to be at MWC 23 more interest in enterprise-class technology than we've ever seen before. What are some of the things that you've observed with that regard? >> Well I've observed a lot of people racing to the highest level messaging about how wonderful it is to have the kiss of a breeze on your cheek, and to feel the flowing wheat. (laughing) I want to hear about the actual things that make this stuff possible. >> Right. >> So I think we have a couple of guests here who can help us start to go down that path of actually understanding the real cool stuff that's behind the scenes. >> And absolutely we got some cool stuff. We've got two guests from Dell. Dave Lincoln is here, the VP of Networking and Emerging the Server Solutions, and Deania Davidson, Director Edge Server Product Planning and Management at Dell. So great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Two Daves, and a Davidson. >> (indistinct) >> Just me who stands alone here. (laughing) So guys talk about, Dave, we'll start with you the newest generation of PowerEdge servers. What's new? Why is it so exciting? What challenges for telecom operators is it solving? >> Yeah, well so this is actually Dell's largest server launch ever. It's the most expansive, which is notable because of, we have a pretty significant portfolio. We're very proud of our core mainstream portfolio. But really since the Supercompute in Dallas in November, that we started a rolling thunder of launches. MWC being part of that leading up to DTW here in May, where we're actually going to be announcing big investments in those parts of the market that are the growth segments of server. Specifically AIML, where we in, to address that. We're investing heavy in our XE series which we, as I said, we announced at Supercompute in November. And then we have to address the CSP segment, a big investment around the HS series which we just announced, and then lastly, the edge telecom segment which we're, we had the biggest investment, biggest announce in portfolio launch with XR series. >> Deania, lets dig into that. >> Yeah. >> Where we see the growth coming from you mentioned telecom CSPs with the edge. What are some of the growth opportunities there that organizations need Dell's help with to manage, so that they can deliver what they're demanding and user is wanting? >> The biggest areas being obviously, in addition the telecom has been the biggest one, but the other areas too we're seeing is in retail and manufacturing as well. And, so internally, I mean we're going to be focused on hardware, but we also have a solutions team who are working with us to build the solutions focused on retail, and edge and telecom as well on top of the servers that we'll talk about shortly. >> What are some of the biggest challenges that retailers and manufacturers are facing? And during the pandemic retailers, those that were successful pivoted very quickly to curbside delivery. >> Deania: Yeah. >> Those that didn't survive weren't able to do that digitally. >> Deania: Yeah. >> But we're seeing such demand. >> Yeah. >> At the retail edge. On the consumer side we want to get whatever we want right now. >> Yes. >> It has to be delivered, it has to be personalized. Talk a little bit more about some of the challenges there, within those two verticals and how Dell is helping to address those with the new server technologies. >> For retail, I think there's couple of things, the one is like in the fast food area. So obviously through COVID a lot of people got familiar and comfortable with driving through. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And so there's probably a certain fast food restaurant everyone's pretty familiar with, they're pretty efficient in that, and so there are other customers who are trying to replicate that, and so how do we help them do that all, from a technology perspective. From a retail, it's one of the pickup and the online experience, but when you go into a store, I don't know about you but I go to Target, and I'm looking for something and I have kids who are kind of distracting you. Its like where is this one thing, and so I pull up the Target App for example, and it tells me where its at, right. And then obviously, stores want to make more money, so like hey, since you picked this thing, there are these things around you. So things like that is what we're having conversations with customers about. >> It's so interesting because the demand is there. >> Yeah, it is. >> And its not going to go anywhere. >> No. >> And it's certainly not going to be dialed down. We're not going to want less stuff, less often. >> Yeah (giggles) >> And as typical consumers, we don't necessarily make the association between what we're seeing in the palm of our hand on a mobile device. >> Deania: Right. >> And the infrastructure that's actually supporting all of it. >> Deania: Right. >> People hear the term Cloud and they think cloud-phone mystery. >> Yeah, magic just happens. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But in fact, in order to support the things that we want to be able to do. >> Yeah. >> On the move, you have to optimize the server hardware. >> Deania: Yes. >> In certain ways. What does that mean exactly? When you say that its optimized, what are the sorts of decisions that you make when you're building? I think of this in the terms of Lego bricks. >> Yes, yeah >> Put together. What are some of the decisions that you make? >> So there were few key things that we really had to think about in terms of what was different from the Data center, which obviously supports the cloud environment, but it was all about how do we get closer to the customer right? How do we get things really fast and how do we compute that information really quickly. So for us, it's things like size. All right, so our server is going to weigh one of them is the size of a shoe box and (giggles), we have a picture with Dave. >> Dave: It's true. >> Took off his shoe. >> Its actually, its actually as big as a shoe. (crowd chuckles) >> It is. >> It is. >> To be fair, its a pretty big shoe. >> True, true. >> It is, but its small in relative to the old big servers that you see. >> I see what you're doing, you find a guy with a size 12, (crowd giggles) >> Yeah. >> Its the size of your shoe. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Its literally the size of a shoe, and that's our smallest server and its the smallest one in the portfolio, its the XR 4000, and so we've actually crammed a lot of technology in there going with the Intel ZRT processors for example to get into that compute power. The XR 8000 which you'll be hearing a lot more about shortly with our next guest is one I think from a telco perspective is our flagship product, and its size was a big thing there too. Ruggedization so its like (indistinct) certification, so it can actually operate continuously in negative 5 to 55 C, which for customers, or they need that range of temperature operation, flexibility was a big thing too. In meaning that, there are some customers who wanted to have one system in different areas of deployment. So can I take this one system and configure it one way, take that same system, configure another way and have it here. So flexibility was really key for us as well, and so we'll actually be seeing that in the next segment coming. >> I think one of, some of the common things you're hearing from this is our focus on innovation, purpose build servers, so yes our times, you know economic situation like in itself is tough yeah. But far from receding we've doubled down on investment and you've seen that with the products that we are launching here, and we will be launching in the years to come. >> I imagine there's a pretty sizeable day impact to the total adjustable market for PowerEdge based on the launch what you're doing, its going to be a tam, a good size tam expansion. >> Yeah, absolutely. Depending on how you look at it, its roughly we add about $30 Billion of adjustable tam between the three purposeful series that we've launched, XE, HS and XR. >> Can you comment on, I know Dell and customers are like this. Talk about, I'd love to get both of your perspective, I'm sure you have a favorite customer stories. But talk about the involvement of the customer in the generation, and the evolution of PowerEdge. Where are they in that process? What kind of feedback do they deliver? >> Well, I mean, just to start, one thing that is essential Cortana of Dell period, is it all is about the customer. All of it, everything that we do is about the customer, and so there is a big focus at our level, from on high to get out there and talk with customers, and actually we have a pretty good story around XR8000 which is call it our flagship of the XR line that we've just announced, and because of this deep customer intimacy, there was a last minute kind of architectural design change. >> Hm-mm. >> Which actually would have been, come to find out it would have been sort of a fatal flaw for deployment. So we corrected that because of this tight intimacy with our customers. This was in two Thanksgiving ago about and, so anyways it's super cool and the fact that we were able to make a change so late in development cycle, that's a testament to a lot of the speed and, speed of innovation that we're driving, so anyway that was that's one, just case of one example. >> Hm-mm. >> Let talk about AI, we can't go to any trade show without talking about AI, the big thing right now is ChatGPT. >> Yeah. >> I was using it the other day, it's so interesting. But, the growing demand for AI, talk about how its driving the evolution of the server so that more AI use cases can become more (indistinct). >> In the edge space primarily, we actually have another product, so I guess what you'll notice in the XR line itself because there are so many different use cases and technologies that support the different use cases. We actually have a range form factor, so we have really small, I guess I would say 350 ml the size of a shoe box, you know, Dave's shoe box. (crowd chuckles) And then we also have, at the other end a 472, so still small, but a little bit bigger, but we did recognize obviously AI was coming up, and so that is our XR 7620 platform and that does support 2 GPUs right, so, like for Edge infrencing, making sure that we have the capability to support customers in that too, but also in the small one, we do also have a GPU capability there, that also helps in those other use cases as well. So we've built the platforms even though they're small to be able to handle the GPU power for customers. >> So nice tight package, a lot of power there. >> Yes. >> Beside as we've all clearly demonstrated the size of Dave's shoe. (crowd chuckles) Dave, talk about Dell's long standing commitment to really helping to rapidly evolve the server market. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Its a pivotal payer there. >> Well, like I was saying, we see innovation, I mean, this is, to us its a race to the top. You talked about racing and messaging that sort of thing, when you opened up the show here, but we see this as a race to the top, having worked at other server companies where maybe its a little bit different, maybe more of a race to the bottom source of approach. That's what I love about being at Dell. This is very much, we understand that it's innovation is that is what's going to deliver the most value for our customers. So whether its some of the first to market, first of its kind sort of innovation that you find in the XR4000, or XR8000, or any of our XE line, we know that at the end of day, that is what going to propel Dell, do the best for our customers and thereby do the best for us. To be honest, its a little bit surprising walking by some of our competitors booths, there's been like a dearth of zero, like no, like it's almost like you wouldn't even know that there was a big launch here right? >> Yeah. >> Or is it just me? >> No. >> It was a while, we've been walking around and yet we've had, and its sort of maybe I should take this as a flattery, but a lot of our competitors have been coming by to our booth everyday actually. >> Deania: Yeah, everyday. >> They came by multiple times yesterday, they came by multiple times today, they're taking pictures of our stuff I kind of want to just send 'em a sample. >> Lisa: Or your shoe. >> Right? Or just maybe my shoe right? But anyway, so I suppose I should take it as an honor. >> Deania: Yeah. >> And conversely when we've walked over there we actually get in back (indistinct), maybe I need a high Dell (indistinct). (crowd chuckles) >> We just had that experience, yeah. >> Its kind of funny but. >> Its a good position to be in. >> Yeah. >> Yes. >> You talked about the involvement of the customers, talk a bit more about Dell's ecosystem is also massive, its part of what makes Dell, Dell. >> Wait did you say ego-system? (laughing) After David just. >> You caught that? Darn it! The talk about the influence or the part of the ecosystem and also some of the feedback from the partners as you've been rapidly evolving the server market and clearly your competitors are taking notice. >> Yeah, sorry. >> Deania: That's okay. >> Dave: you want to take that? >> I mean I would say generally, one of the things that Dell prides itself on is being able to deliver the worlds best innovation into the hands of our customers, faster and better that any other, the optimal solution. So whether its you know, working with our great partners like Intel, AMD Broadcom, these sorts of folks. That is, at the end of the day that is our core mantra, again its retractor on service, doing the best, you know, what's best for the customers. And we want to bring the world's best innovation from our technology partners, get it into the hands of our partners you know, faster and better than any other option out there. >> Its a satisfying business for all of us to be in, because to your point, I made a joke about the high level messaging. But really, that's what it comes down to. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> We do these things, we feel like sometimes we're toiling in obscurity, working with the hardware. But what it delivers. >> Deania: Hm-mm. >> The experiences. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> Deania: Yes. >> Are truly meaningful. So its a fun. >> Absolutely. >> Its a really fun thing to be a part of. >> It is. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. Is there a favorite customer story that you have that really articulates the value of what Dell is doing, full PowerEdge, at the Edge? >> Its probably one I can't particularly name obviously but, it was, they have different environments, so, in one case there's like on flights or on sea vessels, and just being able to use the same box in those different environments is really cool. And they really appreciate having the small compact, where they can just take the server with them and go somewhere. That was really cool to me in terms of how they were using the products that we built for them. >> I have one that's kind of funny. It around XR8000. Again a customer I won't name but they're so proud of it, they almost kinds feel like they co defined it with us, they want to be on the patent with us so, anyways that's. >> Deania: (indistinct). >> That's what they went in for, yeah. >> So it shows the strength of the partnership that. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Of course, the ecosystem of partners, customers, CSVs, telecom Edge. Guys thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Sharing what's new with the PowerEdge. We can't wait to, we're just, we're cracking open the box, we saw the shoe. (laughing) And we're going to be dealing a little bit more later. So thank you. >> We're going to be able to touch something soon? >> Yes, yes. >> Yeah. >> In couple of minutes? >> Next segment I think. >> All right! >> Thanks for setting the table for that guys. We really appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> Alright, our pleasure. >> For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin . You're watching theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage, LIVE in Barcelona, Spain, MWC 23. Don't go anywhere, we will be right back with our next guests. (gentle music)

(cheerful music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I'm here in our Palo Alto studios talking to Greg Gibby, senior product manager, data center products from AMD, and Mohan Rokkam, technical marketing engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Mohan: Hello, hello. >> Greg: Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Good to see each of you. Just really quickly, I want to start out. Let us know a little bit about yourselves. Mohan, let's start with you. What do you do at Dell exactly? >> So I'm a technical marketing engineer at Dell. I've been with Dell for around 15 years now and my goal is to really look at the Dell powered servers and see how do customers take advantage of some of the features we have, especially with the AMD EPYC processors that have just come out. >> Greg, and what do you do at AMD? >> Yeah, so I manage our software-defined infrastructure solutions team, and really it's a cradle to grave where we work with the ISVs in the market, so VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft, et cetera, to integrate the features that we're putting into our processors and make sure they're ready to go and enabled. And then we work with our valued partners like Dell on putting those into actual solutions that customers can buy and then we work with them to sell those solutions into the market. >> Before we get into the details on the 4th Generation EPYC launch and what that means and why people should care. Mohan, maybe you can tell us a little about the relationship between Dell and AMD, how that works, and then Greg, if you've got commentary on that afterwards, that'd be great. Yeah, Mohan. >> Absolutely. Dell and AMD have a long standing partnership, right? Especially now with EPYC series. We have had products since EPYC first generation. We have been doing solutions across the whole range of Dell ecosystem. We have integrated AMD quite thoroughly and effectively and we really love how performant these systems are. So, yeah. >> Dave: Greg, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say the other thing too is, is that we need to point out is that we both have really strong relationships across the entire ecosystem. So memory vendors, the software providers, et cetera, we have technical relationships. We're working with them to optimize solutions so that ultimately when the customer buys that, they get a great user experience right out of the box. >> So, Mohan, I know that you and your team do a lot of performance validation testing as time goes by. I suspect that you had early releases of the 4th Gen EPYC processor technology. What have you been seeing so far? What can you tell us? >> AMD has definitely knocked it out of the park. Time and again, in the past four generations, in the past five years alone, we have done some database work where in five years, we have seen five exit performance. And across the board, AMD is the leader in benchmarks. We have done virtualization where we would consolidate from five into one system. We have world records in AI, we have world records in databases, we have world records in virtualization. The AMD EPYC solutions has been absolutely performant. I'll leave you with one number here. When we went from top of Stack Milan to top of Stack Genoa, we saw a performance bump of 120%. And that number just blew my mind. >> So that prompts a question for Greg. Often we, in industry insiders, think in terms of performance gains over the last generation or the current generation. A lot of customers in the real world, however, are N - 2. They're a ways back, so I guess two points on that. First of all, the kinds of increases the average person is going to see when they move to this architecture, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's even more significant than a lot of the headline numbers because they're moving two generations, number one. Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but then the other thing is the question to you, Greg. I like very long complicated questions, as you can tell. The question is, is it okay for people to skip generations or make the case for upgrades, I guess is the problem? >> Well, yeah, so a couple thoughts on that first too. Mohan talked about that five X over the generation improvements that we've seen. The other key point with that too is that we've made significant process improvements along the way moving to seven nanocomputer to now five nanocomputer and that's really reducing the total amount of power or the performance per watt the customers can realize as well. And when we look at why would a customer want to upgrade, right? And I want to rephrase that as to why aren't you? And there is a real cost of not upgrading. And so when you look at infrastructure, the average age of a server in the data center is over five years old. And if you look at the most popular processors that were sold in that timeframe, it's 8, 10, 12 cores. So now you've got a bunch of servers that you need in order to deliver the applications and meet your SLAs to your end users, and all those servers pull power. They require maintenance. They have the opportunity to go down, et cetera. You got to pay licensing and service and support costs and all those. And when you look at all the costs that roll up, even though the hardware is paid for just to keep the lights on, and not even talking about the soft costs of unplanned downtime, and, "I'm not meeting your SLAs," et cetera, it's very expensive to keep those servers running. Now, if you refresh, and now you have processors that have 32, 64, 96 cores, now you can consolidate that infrastructure and reduce your total power bill. You can reduce your CapEx, you reduce your ongoing OpEx, you improve your performance, and you improve your security profile. So it really is more cost effective to refresh than not to refresh. >> So, Mohan, what has your experience been double clicking on this topic of consolidation? I know that we're going to talk about virtualization in some of the results that you've seen. What have you seen in that regard? Does this favor better consolidation and virtualized environments? And are you both assuring us that the ROI and TCO pencil out on these new big, bad machines? >> Greg definitely hit the nail on the head, right? We are seeing tremendous savings really, if you're consolidating from two generations old. We went from, as I said, five is to one. You're going from five full servers, probably paid off down to one single server. That itself is, if you look at licensing costs, which again, with things like VMware does get pretty expensive. If you move to a single system, yes, we are at 32, 64, 96 cores, but if you compare to the licensing costs of 10 cores, two sockets, that's still pretty significant, right? That's one huge thing. Another thing which actually really drives the thing is we are looking at security, and in today's environment, security becomes a major driving factor for upgrades. Dell has its own setups, cyber-resilient architecture, as we call it, and that really is integrated from processor all the way up into the OS. And those are some of the features which customers really can take advantage of and help protect their ecosystems. >> So what kinds of virtualized environments did you test? >> We have done virtualization across primary codes with VMware, but the Azure Stack, we have looked at Nutanix. PowerFlex is another one within Dell. We have vSAN Ready Nodes. All of these, OpenShift, we have a broad variety of solutions from Dell and AMD really fits into almost every one of them very well. >> So where does hyper-converged infrastructure fit into this puzzle? We can think of a server as something that contains not only AMD's latest architecture but also latest PCIe bus technology and all of the faster memory, faster storage cards, faster nicks, all of that comes together. But how does that play out in Dell's hyper-converged infrastructure or HCI strategy? >> Dell is a leader in hyper-converged infrastructure. We have the very popular VxRail line, we have the PowerFlex, which is now going into the AWS ecosystem as well, Nutanix, and of course, Azure Stack. With all these, when you look at AMD, we have up to 96 cores coming in. We have PCIe Gen 5 which means you can now connect dual port, 100 and 200 gig nicks and get line rate on those so you can connect to your ecosystem. And I don't know if you've seen the news, 200, 400 gig routers and switchers are selling out. That's not slowing down. The network infrastructure is booming. If you want to look at the AI/ML side of things, the VDI side of things, accelerator cards are becoming more and more powerful, more and more popular. And of course they need that higher end data path that PCIe Gen 5 brings to the table. GDDR5 is another huge improvement in terms of performance and latencies. So when we take all this together, you talk about hyper-converged, all of them add into making sure that A, with hyper-converged, you get ease of management, but B, just 'cause you have ease of management doesn't mean you need to compromise on anything. And the AMD servers effectively are a no compromise offering that we at Dell are able to offer to our customers. >> So Greg, I've got a question a little bit from left field for you. We covered Supercompute Conference 2022. We were in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, and there was a lot of discussion of the current processor manufacturer battles, and a lot of buzz around 4th Gen EPYC being launched and what's coming over the next year. Do you have any thoughts on what this architecture can deliver for us in terms of things like AI? We talk about virtualization, but if you look out over the next year, do you see this kind of architecture driving significant change in the world? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It has the real potential to do that from just the building blocks. So we have our chiplet architecture we call it. So you have an IO die and then you have your core complexes that go around that. And we integrate it all with our infinity fabric. That architecture allows you, if we wanted to, replace some of those CCDs with specific accelerators. And so when we look two, three, four years down the road, that architecture and that capability already built into what we're delivering and can easily be moved in. We just need to make sure that when you look at doing that, that the power that's required to do that and the software, et cetera, and those accelerators actually deliver better performance as a dedicated engine versus just using standard CPUs. The other things that I would say too is if you look at emerging workloads. So data center modernization is one of the buzzwords in cloud native, right? And these container environments, well, AMD'S architecture really just screams support for those type of environments, right? Where when you get into these larger core accounts and the consolidation that Mohan talked about. Now when I'm in a container environment, that blast radius so a lot of customers have concerns around, "Hey, having a single point of failure and having more than X number of cores concerns me." If I'm in containers, that becomes less of a concern. And so when you look at cloud native, containerized applications, data center modernization, AMD's extremely well positioned to take advantage of those use cases as well. >> Yeah, Mohan, and when we talk about virtualization, I think sometimes we have to remind everyone that yeah, we're talking about not only virtualization that has a full-blown operating system in the bucket, but also virtualization where the containers have microservices and things like that. I think you had something to add, Mohan. >> I did, and I think going back to the accelerator side of business, right? When we are looking at the current technology and looking at accelerators, AMD has done a fantastic job of adding in features like AVX-512, we have the bfloat16 and eight features. And some of what these do is they're effectively built-in accelerators for certain workloads especially in the AI and media spaces. And in some of these use cases we look at, for example, are inference. Traditionally we have used external accelerator cards, but for some of the entry level and mid-level use cases, CPU is going to work just fine especially with the newer CPUs that we are seeing this fantastic performance from. The accelerators just help get us to the point where if I'm at the edge, if I'm in certain use cases, I don't need to have an accelerator in there. I can run most of my inference workloads right on the CPU. >> Yeah, yeah. You know the game. It's an endless chase to find the bottleneck. And once we've solved the puzzle, we've created a bottleneck somewhere else. Back to the supercompute conversations we had, specifically about some of the AMD EPYC processor technology and the way that Dell is packaging it up and leveraging things like connectivity. That was one of the things that was also highlighted. This idea that increasingly connectivity is critically important, not just for supercomputing, but for high-performance computing that's finding its way out of the realms of Los Alamos and down to the enterprise level. Gentlemen, any more thoughts about the partnership or maybe a hint at what's coming in the future? I know that the original AMD announcement was announcing and previewing some things that are rolling out over the next several months. So let me just toss it to Greg. What are we going to see in 2023 in terms of rollouts that you can share with us? >> That I can share with you? Yeah, so I think look forward to see more advancements in the technology at the core level. I think we've already announced our product code name Bergamo, where we'll have up to 128 cores per socket. And then as we look in, how do we continually address this demand for data, this demand for, I need actionable insights immediately, look for us to continue to drive performance leadership in our products that are coming out and address specific workloads and accelerators where appropriate and where we see a growing market. >> Mohan, final thoughts. >> On the Dell side, of course, we have four very rich and configurable options with AMD EPYC servers. But beyond that, you'll see a lot more solutions. Some of what Greg has been talking about around the next generation of processors or the next updated processors, you'll start seeing some of those. and you'll definitely see more use cases from us and how customers can implement them and take advantage of the features that. It's just exciting stuff. >> Exciting stuff indeed. Gentlemen, we have a great year ahead of us. As we approach possibly the holiday seasons, I wish both of you well. Thank you for joining us. From here in the Palo Alto studios, again, Dave Nicholson here. Stay tuned for our continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. Thanks for joining us. (cheerful music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch. I've got a special guest with me today from Prowess Consulting. His name is Evan Touger, he's a senior technical writer with Prowess. Evan, welcome. >> Hi, great to be here. Thanks. >> So tell us a little bit about Prowess, what does Prowess do? >> Yeah, we're a consulting firm. We've been around for quite a few years, based in Bellevue, Washington. And we do quite a few projects with folks from Dell to a lot of other companies, and dive in. We have engineers, writers, production folks, so pretty much end-to-end work, doing research testing and writing, and diving into different technical topics. >> So you- in this case what we're going to be talking about is some validation studies that you've done, looking at Dell PowerEdge servers that happened to be integrating in fourth-gen EPYC processors from AMD. What were the specific workloads that you were focused on in this study? >> Yeah, this particular one was honing in on virtualization, right? You know, obviously it's pretty much ubiquitous in the industry, everybody works with virtualization in one way or another. So just getting optimal performance for virtualization was critical, or is critical for most businesses. So we just wanted to look a little deeper into, you know, how do companies evaluate that? What are they going to use to make the determination for virtualization performance as it relates to their workloads? So that led us to this study, where we looked at some benchmarks, and then went a little deeper under the hood to see what led to the results that we saw from those benchmarks. >> So when you say virtualization, does that include virtual desktop infrastructure or are we just talking about virtual machines in general? >> No, it can include both. We looked at VMs, thinking in terms of what about database performance when you're working in VMs, all the way through to VDI and companies like healthcare organizations and so forth, where it's common to roll out lots of virtual desktops, and performance is critical there as well. >> Okay, you alluded to, sort of, looking under the covers to see, you know, where these performance results were coming from. I assume what you're referencing is the idea that it's not just all about the CPU when you talk about a system. Am I correct in that assumption and- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What can you tell us? >> Well, you know, for companies evaluating, there's quite a bit to consider, obviously. So they're looking at not just raw performance but power performance. So that was part of it, and then what makes up that- those factors, right? So certainly CPU is critical to that, but then other things come into play, like the RAID controllers. So we looked a little bit there. And then networking, of course can be critical for configurations that are relying on good performance on their networks, both in terms of bandwidth and just reducing latency overall. So interconnects as well would be a big part of that. So with, with PCIe gen 5 or 5.0 pick your moniker. You know in this- in the infrastructure game, we're often playing a game of whack-a-mole, looking for the bottlenecks, you know, chasing the bottlenecks. PCIe 5 opens up a lot of bandwidth for memory and things like RAID controllers and NICs. I mean, is the bottleneck now just our imagination, Evan, have we reached a point where there are no bottlenecks? What did you see when you ran these tests? What, you know, what were you able to stress to a point where it was saturated, if anything? >> Yeah. Well, first of all, we didn't- these are particular tests were ones that we looked at industry benchmarks, and we were examining in particular to see where world records were set. And so we uncovered a few specific servers, PowerEdge servers that were pretty key there, or had a lot of- were leading in the category in a lot of areas. So that's what led us to then, okay, well why is that? What's in these servers, and what's responsible for that? So in a lot of cases they, we saw these results even with, you know, gen 4, PCIe gen 4. So there were situations where clearly there was benefit from faster interconnects and, and especially NVMe for RAID, you know, for supporting NVMe and SSDs. But all of that just leads you to the understanding that it means it can only get better, right? So going from gen 4 to- if you're seeing great results on gen 4, then gen 5 is probably going to be, you know, blow that away. >> And in this case, >> It'll be even better. >> In this case, gen 5 you're referencing PCIe >> PCIe right. Yeah, that's right. >> (indistinct) >> And then the same thing with EPYC actually holds true, some of the records, we saw records set for both 3rd and 4th gen, so- with EPYC, so the same thing there. Anywhere there's a record set on the 3rd gen, you know, makes us really- we're really looking forward to going back and seeing over the next few months, which of those records fall and are broken by newer generation versions of these servers, once they actually wrap to the newer generation processors. You know, based on, on what we're seeing for the- for what those processors can do, not only in. >> (indistinct) Go ahead. >> Sorry, just want to say, not only in terms of raw performance, but as I mentioned before, the power performance, 'cause they're very efficient, and that's a really critical consideration, right? I don't think you can overstate that for companies who are looking at, you know, have to consider expenditures and power and cooling and meeting sustainability goals and so forth. So that was really an important category in terms of what we looked at, was that power performance, not just raw performance. >> Yeah, I want to get back to that, that's a really good point. We should probably give credit where credit is due. Which Dell PowerEdge servers are we talking about that were tested and what did those interconnect components look like from a (indistinct) perspective? >> Yeah, so we focused primarily on a couple benchmarks that seemed most important for real world performance results for virtualization. TPCx-V and VMmark 3.x. the TPCx-V, that's where we saw PowerEdge R7525, R7515. They both had top scores in different categories there. That benchmark is great for looking at database workloads in particular, right? Running in virtualization settings. And then the VMmark 3.x was critical. We saw good, good results there for the 7525 and the R 7515 as well as the R 6525, in that one and that included, sorry, just checking notes to see what- >> Yeah, no, no, no, no, (indistinct) >> Included results for power performance, as I mentioned earlier, that's where we could see that. So we kind of, we saw this in a range of servers that included both 3rd gen AMD EPYC and newer 4th gen as well as I mentioned. The RAID controllers were critical in the TPCx-V. I don't think that came into play in the VM mark test, but they were definitely part of the TPCx-V benchmarks. So that's where the RAID controllers would make a difference, right? And in those tests, I think they're using PERC 11. So, you know, the newer PERC 12 controllers there, again we'd expect >> (indistinct) >> To see continued, you know, gains in newer benchmarks. That's what we'll be looking for over the next several months. >> Yeah. So I think if I've got my Dell nomenclature down, performance, no no, PowerEdge RAID Controller, is that right? >> Exactly, yeah, there you go. Right? >> With Broadcom, you know, powered by Broadcom. >> That's right. There you go. Yeah. Isn't the Dell naming scheme there PERC? >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. Back to your comment about power. So you've had a chance to take a pretty deep look at the latest stuff coming out. You're confident that- 'cause some of these servers are going to be more expensive than previous generation. Now a server is not a server is not a server, but some are awakening to the idea that there might be some sticker shock. You're confident that the bang for your buck, the bang for your kilowatt hour is actually going to be beneficial. We're actually making things better, faster, stronger, cheaper, more energy efficient. We're continuing on that curve? >> That's what I would expect to see, right. I mean, of course can't speak to to pricing without knowing, you know, where the dollars are going to land on the servers. But I would expect to see that because you're getting gains in a couple of ways. I mean, one, if the performance increases to the point where you can run more VMs, right? Get more performance out of your VMs and run more total VMs or more BDIs, then there's obviously a good, you know, payback on your investment there. And then as we were discussing earlier, just the power performance ratio, right? So if you're bringing down your power and cooling costs, if these machines are just more efficient overall, then you should see some gains there as well. So, you know, I think the key is looking at what's the total cost of ownership over, you know, a standard like a three-year period or something and what you're going to get out of it for your number of sessions, the performance for the sessions, and the overall efficiency of the machines. >> So just just to be clear with these Dell PowerEdge servers, you were able to validate world record performance. But this isn't, if you, if you look at CPU architecture, PCIe bus architecture, memory, you know, the class of memory, the class of RAID controller, the class of NIC. Those were not all state of the art in terms of at least what has been recently announced. Correct? >> Right. >> Because (indistinct) the PCI 4.0, So to your point- world records with that, you've got next-gen RAID controllers coming out, and NICs coming out. If the motherboard was PCIe 5, with commensurate memory, all of those things are getting better. >> Exactly, right. I mean you're, you're really you're just eliminating bandwidth constraints latency constraints, you know, all of that should be improved. NVMe, you know, just collectively all these things just open the doors, you know, letting more bandwidth through reducing all the latency. Those are, those are all pieces of the puzzle, right? That come together and it's all about finding the weakest link and eliminating it. And I think we're reaching the point where we're removing the biggest constraints from the systems. >> Okay. So I guess is it fair to summarize to say that with this infrastructure that you tested, you were able to set world records. This, during this year, I mean, over the next several months, things are just going to get faster and faster and faster and faster. >> That's what I would anticipate, exactly, right. If they're setting world records with these machines before some of the components are, you know, the absolute latest, it seems to me we're going to just see a continuing trend there, and more and more records should fall. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how that goes, 'cause it's already good and I think the return on investment is pretty good there. So I think it's only going to get better as these roll out. >> So let me ask you a question that's a little bit off topic. >> Okay. >> Kind of, you know, we see these gains, you know, we're all familiar with Moore's Law, we're familiar with, you know, the advancements in memory and bus architecture and everything else. We just covered SuperCompute 2022 in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. And it was fascinating talking to people about advances in AI that will be possible with new architectures. You know, most of these supercomputers that are running right now are n minus 1 or n minus 2 infrastructure, you know, they're, they're, they're PCI 3, right. And maybe two generations of processors old, because you don't just throw out a 100,000 CPU super computing environment every 18 months. It doesn't work that way. >> Exactly. >> Do you have an opinion on this question of the qualitative versus quantitative increase in computing moving forward? And, I mean, do you think that this new stuff that you're starting to do tests on is going to power a fundamental shift in computing? Or is it just going to be more consolidation, better power consumption? Do you think there's an inflection point coming? What do you think? >> That's a great question. That's a hard one to answer. I mean, it's probably a little bit of both, 'cause certainly there will be better consolidation, right? But I think that, you know, the systems, it works both ways. It just allows you to do more with less, right? And you can go either direction, you can do what you're doing now on fewer machines, you know, and get better value for it, or reduce your footprint. Or you can go the other way and say, wow, this lets us add more machines into the mix and take our our level of performance from here to here, right? So it just depends on what your focus is. Certainly with, with areas like, you know, HPC and AI and ML, having the ability to expand what you already are capable of by adding more machines that can do more is going to be your main concern. But if you're more like a small to medium sized business and the opportunity to do what you were doing on, on a much smaller footprint and for lower costs, that's really your goal, right? So I think you can use this in either direction and it should, should pay back in a lot of dividends. >> Yeah. Thanks for your thoughts. It's an interesting subject moving forward. You know, sometimes it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of the bits and bites and bobs of all the components we're studying, but they're powering something that that's going to effect effectively all of humanity as we move forward. So what else do we need to consider when it comes to what you've just validated in the virtualization testing? Anything else, anything we left out? >> I think we hit all the key points, or most of them it's, you know, really, it's just keeping in mind that it's all about the full system, the components not- you know, the processor is a obviously a key, but just removing blockages, right? Freeing up, getting rid of latency, improving bandwidth, all these things come to play. And then the power performance, as I said, I know I keep coming back to that but you know, we just, and a lot of what we work on, we just see that businesses, that's a really big concern for businesses and finding efficiency, right? And especially in an age of constrained budgets, that's a big deal. So, it's really important to have that power performance ratio. And that's one of the key things we saw that stood out to us in, in some of these benchmarks, so. >> Well, it's a big deal for me. >> It's all good. >> Yeah, I live in California and I know exactly how much I pay for a kilowatt hour of electricity. >> I bet, yeah. >> My friends in other places don't even know. So I totally understand the power constraint question. >> Yeah, it's not going to get better, so, anything you can do there, right? >> Yeah. Well Evan, this has been great. Thanks for sharing the results that Prowess has come up with, third party validation that, you know, even without the latest and greatest components in all categories, Dell PowerEdge servers are able to set world records. And I anticipate that those world records will be broken in 2023 and I expect that Prowess will be part of that process, So Thanks for that. For the rest of us- >> (indistinct) >> Here at theCUBE, I want to thank you for joining us. Stay tuned for continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, for myself and for Evan Touger. Thanks so much for joining us. (upbeat music)

(techno music intro) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of SuperComputing Conference 2022. We are here at day three covering the amazing events that are occurring here. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. How's it goin', Paul? >> Fine, Dave. Winding down here, but still plenty of action. >> Interesting stuff. We got a full day of coverage, and we're having really, really interesting conversations. We sort of wrapped things up at Supercomputing 22 here in Dallas. I've got two very special guests with me, Scott from Intel and David from Dell, to talk about yeah supercomputing, but guess what? We've got some really cool stuff coming up after this whole thing wraps. So not all of the holiday gifts have been unwrapped yet, kids. Welcome gentlemen. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, let's start with you, David. First of all, explain the relationship in general between Dell and Intel. >> Sure, so obviously Intel's been an outstanding partner. We built some great solutions over the years. I think the market reflects that. Our customers tell us that. The feedback's strong. The products you see out here this week at Supercompute, you know, put that on display for everybody to see. And then as we think about AI in machine learning, there's so many different directions we need to go to help our customers deliver AI outcomes. Right, so we recognize that AI has kind of spread outside of just the confines of everything we've seen here this week. And now we've got really accessible AI use cases that we can explain to friends and family. We can talk about going into retail environments and how AI is being used to track inventory, to monitor traffic, et cetera. But really what that means to us as a bunch of hardware folks is we have to deliver the right platforms and the right designs for a variety of environments, both inside and outside the data center. And so if you look at our portfolio, we have some great products here this week, but we also have other platforms, like the XR4000, our shortest rack server ever that's designed to go into Edge environments, but is also built for those Edge AI use cases that supports GPUs. It supports AI on the CPU as well. And so there's a lot of really compelling platforms that we're starting to talk about, have already been talking about, and it's going to really enable our customers to deliver AI in a variety of ways. >> You mentioned AI on the CPU. Maybe this is a question for Scott. What does that mean, AI on the CPU? >> Well, as David was talking about, we're just seeing this explosion of different use cases. And some of those on the Edge, some of them in the Cloud, some of them on Prem. But within those individual deployments, there's often different ways that you can do AI, whether that's training or inference. And what we're seeing is a lot of times the memory locality matters quite a bit. You don't want to have to pay necessarily a cost going across the PCI express bus, especially with some of our newer products like the CPU Max series, where you can have a huge about of high bandwidth memory just sitting right on the CPU. Things that traditionally would have been accelerator only, can now live on a CPU, and that includes both on the inference side. We're seeing some really great things with images, where you might have a giant medical image that you need to be able to do extremely high resolution inference on or even text, where you might have a huge corpus of extremely sparse text that you need to be able to randomly sample very efficiently. >> So how are these needs influencing the evolution of Intel CPU architectures? >> So, we're talking to our customers. We're talking to our partners. This presents both an opportunity, but also a challenge with all of these different places that you can put these great products, as well as applications. And so we're very thoughtfully trying to go to the market, see where their needs are, and then meet those needs. This industry obviously has a lot of great players in it, and it's no longer the case that if you build it, they will come. So what we're doing is we're finding where are those choke points, how can we have that biggest difference? Sometimes there's generational leaps, and I know David can speak to this, can be huge from one system to the next just because everything's accelerated on the software side, the hardware side, and the platforms themselves. >> That's right, and we're really excited about that leap. If you take what Scott just described, we've been writing white papers, our team with Scott's team, we've been talking about those types of use cases using doing large image analysis and leveraging system memory, leveraging the CPU to do that, we've been talking about that for several generations now. Right, going back to Cascade Lake, going back to what we would call 14th generation power Edge. And so now as we prepare and continue to unveil, kind of we're in launch season, right, you and I were talking about how we're in launch season. As we continue to unveil and launch more products, the performance improvements are just going to be outstanding and we'll continue that evolution that Scott described. >> Yeah, I'd like to applaud Dell just for a moment for its restraint. Because I know you could've come in and taken all of the space in the convention center to show everything that you do. >> Would have loved to. >> In the HPC space. Now, worst kept secrets on earth at this point. Vying for number one place is the fact that there is a new Mission Impossible movie coming. And there's also new stuff coming from Intel. I know, I think allegedly we're getting close. What can you share with us on that front? And I appreciate it if you can't share a ton of specifics, but where are we going? David just alluded to it. >> Yeah, as David talked about, we've been working on some of these things for many years. And it's just, this momentum is continuing to build, both in respect to some of our hardware investments. We've unveiled some things both here, both on the CPU side and the accelerator side, but also on the software side. OneAPI is gathering more and more traction and the ecosystem is continuing to blossom. Some of our AI and HPC workloads, and the combination thereof, are becoming more and more viable, as well as displacing traditional approaches to some of these problems. And it's this type of thing where it's not linear. It all builds on itself. And we've seen some of these investments that we've made for a better half of a decade starting to bear fruit, but that's, it's not just a one time thing. It's just going to continue to roll out, and we're going to be seeing more and more of this. >> So I want to follow up on something that you mentioned. I don't know if you've ever heard that the Charlie Brown saying that sometimes the most discouraging thing can be to have immense potential. Because between Dell and Intel, you offer so many different versions of things from a fit for function perspective. As a practical matter, how do you work with customers, and maybe this is a question for you, David. How do you work with customers to figure out what the right fit is? >> I'll give you a great example. Just this week, customer conversations, and we can put it in terms of kilowatts to rack, right. How many kilowatts are you delivering at a rack level inside your data center? I've had an answer anywhere from five all the way up to 90. There's some that have been a bit higher that probably don't want to talk about those cases, kind of customers we're meeting with very privately. But the range is really, really large, right, and there's a variety of environments. Customers might be ready for liquid today. They may not be ready for it. They may want to maximize air cooling. Those are the conversations, and then of course it all maps back to the workloads they wish to enable. AI is an extremely overloaded term. We don't have enough time to talk about all the different things that tuck under that umbrella, but the workloads and the outcomes they wish to enable, we have the right solutions. And then we take it a step further by considering where they are today, where they need to go. And I just love that five to 90 example of not every customer has an identical cookie cutter environment, so we've got to have the right platforms, the right solutions, for the right workloads, for the right environments. >> So, I like to dive in on this power issue, to give people who are watching an idea. Because we say five kilowatts, 90 kilowatts, people are like, oh wow, hmm, what does that mean? 90 kilowatts is more than 100 horse power if you want to translate it over. It's a massive amount of power, so if you think of EV terms. You know, five kilowatts is about a hairdryer's around a kilowatt, 1,000 watts, right. But the point is, 90 kilowatts in a rack, that's insane. That's absolutely insane. The heat that that generates has got to be insane, and so it's important. >> Several houses in the size of a closet. >> Exactly, exactly. Yeah, in a rack I explain to people, you know, it's like a refrigerator. But, so in the arena of thermals, I mean is that something during the development of next gen architectures, is that something that's been taken into consideration? Or is it just a race to die size? >> Well, you definitely have to take thermals into account, as well as just the power of consumption themselves. I mean, people are looking at their total cost of ownership. They're looking at sustainability. And at the end of the day, they need to solve a problem. There's many paths up that mountain, and it's about choosing that right path. We've talked about this before, having extremely thoughtful partners, we're just not going to common-torily try every single solution. We're going to try to find the ones that fit that right mold for that customer. And we're seeing more and more people, excuse me, care about this, more and more people wanting to say, how do I do this in the most sustainable way? How do I do this in the most reliable way, given maybe different fluctuations in their power consumption or their power pricing? We're developing more software tools and obviously partnering with great partners to make sure we do this in the most thoughtful way possible. >> Intel put a lot of, made a big investment by buying Habana Labs for its acceleration technology. They're based in Israel. You're based on the west coast. How are you coordinating with them? How will the Habana technology work its way into more mainstream Intel products? And how would Dell integrate those into your servers? >> Good question. I guess I can kick this off. So Habana is part of the Intel family now. They've been integrated in. It's been a great journey with them, as some of their products have launched on AWS, and they've had some very good wins on MLPerf and things like that. I think it's about finding the right tool for the job, right. Not every problem is a nail, so you need more than just a hammer. And so we have the Xeon series, which is incredibly flexible, can do so many different things. It's what we've come to know and love. On the other end of the spectrum, we obviously have some of these more deep learning focused accelerators. And if that's your problem, then you can solve that problem in incredibly efficient ways. The accelerators themselves are somewhere in the middle, so you get that kind of Goldilocks zone of flexibility and power. And depending on your use case, depending on what you know your workloads are going to be day in and day out, one of these solutions might work better for you. A combination might work better for you. Hybrid compute starts to become really interesting. Maybe you have something that you need 24/7, but then you only need a burst to certain things. There's a lot of different options out there. >> The portfolio approach. >> Exactly. >> And then what I love about the work that Scott's team is doing, customers have told us this week in our meetings, they do not want to spend developer's time porting code from one stack to the next. They want that flexibility of choice. Everyone does. We want it in our lives, in our every day lives. They need that flexibility of choice, but they also, there's an opportunity cost when their developers have to choose to port some code over from one stack to another or spend time improving algorithms and doing things that actually generate, you know, meaningful outcomes for their business or their research. And so if they are, you know, desperately searching I would say for that solution and for help in that area, and that's what we're working to enable soon. >> And this is what I love about oneAPI, our software stack, it's open first, heterogeneous first. You can take SYCL code, it can run on competitor's hardware. It can run on Intel hardware. It's one of these things that you have to believe long term, the future is open. Wall gardens, the walls eventually crumble. And we're just trying to continue to invest in that ecosystem to make sure that the in-developer at the end of the day really gets what they need to do, which is solving their business problem, not tinkering with our drivers. >> Yeah, I actually saw an interesting announcement that I hadn't been tracking. I hadn't been tracking this area. Chiplets, and the idea of an open standard where competitors of Intel from a silicone perspective can have their chips integrated via a universal standard. And basically you had the top three silicone vendors saying, yeah, absolutely, let's work together. Cats and dogs. >> Exactly, but at the end of the day, it's whatever menagerie solves the problem. >> Right, right, exactly. And of course Dell can solve it from any angle. >> Yeah, we need strong partners to build the platforms to actually do it. At the end of the day, silicone without software is just sand. Sand with silicone is poorly written prose. But without an actual platform to put it on, it's nothing, it's a box that sits in the corner. >> David, you mentioned that 90% of power age servers now support GPUs. So how is this high-performing, the growth of high performance computing, the demand, influencing the evolution of your server architecture? >> Great question, a couple of ways. You know, I would say 90% of our platforms support GPUs. 100% of our platforms support AI use cases. And it goes back to the CPU compute stack. As we look at how we deliver different form factors for customers, we go back to that range, I said that power range this week of how do we enable the right air coolant solutions? How do we deliver the right liquid cooling solutions, so that wherever the customer is in their environment, and whatever footprint they have, we're ready to meet it? That's something you'll see as we go into kind of the second half of launch season and continue rolling out products. You're going to see some very compelling solutions, not just in air cooling, but liquid cooling as well. >> You want to be more specific? >> We can't unveil everything at Supercompute. We have a lot of great stuff coming up here in the next few months, so. >> It's kind of like being at a great restaurant when they offer you dessert, and you're like yeah, dessert would be great, but I just can't take anymore. >> It's a multi course meal. >> At this point. Well, as we wrap, I've got one more question for each of you. Same question for each of you. When you think about high performance computing, super computing, all of the things that you're doing in your partnership, driving artificial intelligence, at that tip of the spear, what kind of insights are you looking forward to us being able to gain from this technology? In other words, what cool thing, what do you think is cool out there from an AI perspective? What problem do you think we can solve in the near future? What problems would you like to solve? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Cause it's not the little, it's not the bits and the bobs and the speeds and the feats, it's what we're going to do with them, so what do you think, David? >> I'll give you an example. And I think, I saw some of my colleagues talk about this earlier in the week, but for me what we could do in the past two years to unable our customers in a quarantine pandemic environment, we were delivering platforms and solutions to help them do their jobs, help them carry on in their lives. And that's just one example, and if I were to map that forward, it's about enabling that human progress. And it's, you know, you ask a 20 year version of me 20 years ago, you know, if you could imagine some of these things, I don't know what kind of answer you would get. And so mapping forward next decade, next two decades, I can go back to that example of hey, we did great things in the past couple of years to enable our customers. Just imagine what we're going to be able to do going forward to enable that human progress. You know, there's great use cases, there's great image analysis. We talked about some. The images that Scott was referring to had to do with taking CAT scan images and being able to scan them for tumors and other things in the healthcare industry. That is stuff that feels good when you get out of bed in the morning, to know that you're enabling that type of progress. >> Scott, quick thoughts? >> Yeah, and I'll echo that. It's not one specific use case, but it's really this wave front of all of these use cases, from the very micro of developing the next drug to finding the next battery technology, all the way up to the macro of trying to have an impact on climate change or even the origins of the universe itself. All of these fields are seeing these massive gains, both from the software, the hardware, the platforms that we're bringing to bear to these problems. And at the end of the day, humanity is going to be fundamentally transformed by the computation that we're launching and working on today. >> Fantastic, fantastic. Thank you, gentlemen. You heard it hear first, Intel and Dell just committed to solving the secrets of the universe by New Years Eve 2023. >> Well, next Supercompute, let's give us a little time. >> The next Supercompute Convention. >> Yeah, next year. >> Yeah, SC 2023, we'll come back and see what problems have been solved. You heard it hear first on theCube, folks. By SC 23, Dell and Intel are going to reveal the secrets of the universe. From here, at SC 22, I'd like to thank you for joining our conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. Stay tuned to theCube's coverage of Supercomputing Conference 22. We'll be back after a short break. (techno music)

>>Good afternoon friends, and welcome back to Supercomputing. We're live here at the Cube in Dallas. I'm joined by my co-host, David. My name is Savannah Peterson and our a fabulous guest. I feel like this is almost his show to a degree, given his role at Dell. He is the Vice President of HPC over at Dell. Raja Phan, thank you so much for being on the show with us. How you doing? >>Thank you guys. I'm doing okay. Good to be back in person. This is a great show. It's really filled in nicely today and, and you know, a lot of great stuff happening. >>It's great to be around all of our fellow hardware nerds. The Dell portfolio grew by three products. It it did, I believe. Can you give us a bit of an intro on >>That? Sure. Well, yesterday afternoon and yesterday evening, we had a series of events that announced our new AI portfolio, artificial intelligence portfolio, you know, which will really help scale where I think the world is going in the future with, with the creation of, of all this data and what we can do with it. So yeah, it was an exciting day for us. Yesterday we had a, a session over in a ballroom where we did a product announce and then in the evening had an unveil in our booth here at the SUPERCOMPUTE conference, which was pretty eventful cupcakes, you know, champagne drinks and, and most importantly, Yeah, I know. Good time. Did >>You get the invite? >>No, I, most importantly, some really cool new servers for our customers. >>Well, tell us about them. Yeah, so what's, what's new? What's in the news? >>Well, you know, as you think about artificial intelligence and what customers are, are needing to do and the way artificial intelligence is gonna change how, you know, frankly, the world works. We have now developed and designed new purpose-built hardware, new purpose-built servers for a variety of AI and artificial intelligence needs. We launched our first eight way, you know, Invidia H 100 a a 100 s XM product. Yesterday we launched a four u four way H 100 product yesterday and a two u fully liquid cooled intel data center, Max GPU server yesterday as well. So, you know, a full range of portfolio for a variety of customer needs, depending on their use cases, what they're trying to do, their infrastructure, we're able to now provide, you know, servers to and hardware that help, you know, meet those needs in those use cases. >>So I wanna double click, you just said something interesting, water cooled. >>Yeah. So >>Where does, at what point do you need to move in the direction of water cooling and, you know, I know you mentioned, you know, GPU centric, but, but, but talk about that, that balance between, you know, a density and what you can achieve with the power that's going into the system. Well, you system, >>It all depends on what the customers are trying to accommodate, right? I, I think that there's a dichotomy that's existing now between customers who have already or are planning liquid cooled infrastructures and power distribution to the rack. So you take those two together and if you have the power distribution to the rack, you wanna take advantage of the density to take advantage of the density you need to be able to cool the servers and therefore liquid cooling comes into play. Now you have other customers that either don't have the power to the rack or aren't ready for liquid cooling, and at that point, you know, they're not gonna want to take advantage. They can't take advantage of the density. So there's this dichotomy in products, and that's why we've got our XE 96 40, which is in two U dense liquid cooled, but we also have our XE 86 40, which is a four U air cold, right? Or liquid assisted air cold, right? So depending on where you are on your journey, whether it's power infrastructure, liquid cooling, infrastructure, we've got the right solution for you that, you know, meets your needs. You don't have to take advantage of the density, the expense of liquid cooling, unless you're ready to do that. Otherwise we've got this other option for you. And so that's really what dichotomy is beginning to exist in our customers infrastructures today. >>I was curious about that. So do you see, is there a category or a vertical that is more in the liquid cooling zone because that's a priority in terms of the density or >>Yeah, yeah. I mean, you've got your, your large HTC installations, right? Your large clusters that not only have the power have, you know, the liquid cooling density that they've built in, you've got, you know, federal government installations, you've got financial tech installations, you've got colos that are built for sustainability and density and space that, that can also take advantage of it. Then you've got others that are, you know, more enterprises, more in the mainstream of what they do, where, you know, they're not ready for that. So it just, it just depends on the scale of the customer that we're talking about and what they're trying to do and, and where they're, and where they're doing it. >>So we hear, you know, we hear at Supercomputing conference and HPC is sort of the kind of trailing mini version of supercomputing in a way where maybe you have someone who they don't need 2 million CPU cores, but maybe they need a hundred thousand CPU cores. So it's all a matter of scale. What is, can you identify kind of an HPC sweet spot right now as, as Dell customers are adopting the kinds of things that you just just announced? >>You know, I think >>How big are these clusters at this >>Point? Well, let, let me, let me hit something else first. Yeah, I think people talk about HPC as, as something really specific and what we're seeing now with the, you know, vast amount of data creation, the need for computational analytics, the need for artificial intelligence, the HPC is kind of morphing right into, into, you know, more and more general customer use cases. And so where before you used to think about HPC is research and academics and computational dynamics. Now, you know, there's a significant Venn diagram overlap with just regular artificial intelligence, right? And, and so that is beginning to change the nature of how we think about hpc. You think about the vast data that's being created. You've got data driven HPC where you're running computational analytics on this data that's giving you insights or outcomes or information. It's not just, Hey, I'm running, you know, physics calculations or astronomical how, you know, calculations. It is now expanding in a variety of ways where it's democratizing into, you know, customers who wouldn't actually talk about themselves as HVC customers. And when you meet with them, it's like, well, yeah, but your compute needs are actually looking like HPC customers. So let's talk to you about these products. Let's talk to you about these solutions, whether it's software solutions, hardware solutions, or even purpose-built hardware. Like we're, like we talked about that now becomes the new norm. >>Customer feedback and community engagement is big for you. I know this portfolio of products that was developed based on customer feedback, correct? Yep. >>So everything we do at Dell is customer driven, right? We want to be, we want to drive, you know, customer driven innovation, customer driven value to meet our customer's needs. So yeah, we spent a while, right, researching these products, researching these needs, understanding is this one product? Is it two products? Is it three products? Talking to our partners, right? Driving our own innovation in IP and then where they're going with their roadmaps to be able to deliver kind of a harmonized solution to customers. So yeah, it was a good amount of customer engagement. I know I was on the road quite a bit talking to customers, you know, one of our products was, you know, we almost named after one of our customers, right? I'm like, Hey, this, we've talked about this. This is what you said you wanted. Now he, he was representative of a group of customers and we validated that with other customers and it's also a way of me making sure he buys it. But great, great. Yeah, >>Sharing sales there, >>That was good. But you know, it's heavily customer driven and that's where understanding those use cases and where they fit drove the various products. And, you know, in terms of, in terms of capability, in terms of size, in terms of liquid versus air cooling, in terms of things like number of P C I E lanes, right? What the networking infrastructure was gonna look like. All customer driven, all designed to meet where customers are going in their artificial intelligence journey, in their AI journey. >>It feels really collaborative. I mean, you've got both the intel and the Nvidia GPU on your new product. There's a lot of CoLab between academics and the private sector. What has you most excited today about supercomputing? >>What it's going to enable? If you think about what artificial intelligence is gonna enable, it's gonna enable faster medical research, right? Genomics the next pandemic. Hopefully not anytime soon. We'll be able to diagnose, we'll be able to track it so much faster through artificial intelligence, right? That the data that was created in this last one is gonna be an amazing source of research to, to go address stuff like that in the future and get to the heart of the problem faster. If you think about a manufacturing and, and process improvement, you can now simulate your entire manufacturing process. You don't have to run physical pilots, right? You can simulate it all, get 90% of the way there, which means your, your either factory process will get reinvented factor faster, or a new factory can get up and running faster. Think about retail, how retail products are laid out. >>You can use media analytics to track how customers go through the store, what they're buying. You can lay things out differently. You're not gonna have in the future people going, you know, to test cell phone reception. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me? Now you can simulate where customers are patterns to ensure that the 5G infrastructure is set up, you know, to the maximum advantage. All of that through digital simulation, through digital twins, through media analytics, through natural language processing. Customer experience is gonna be better, communication's gonna be better. All of this stuff with, you know, using this data, training it, and then applying it is probably what excites me the most about super computing and, and really compute in the future. >>So on the hardware front, kind of digging down below the, the covers, you know, the surface a little more, Dell has been well known for democratizing things in it, making them available to, at a variety of levels. Never a one size fits all right? Company, these latest announcements would be fair to say. They represent sort of the tip of the spear in terms of high performance. What about, what about rpc regular performance computing? Where's, where's the overlap? Cause you know, we're in this season where we've got AMD and Intel leapfrogging one another, new bus architectures. The, the, you know, the, the connectivity that's plugged into these things are getting faster and faster and faster. So from a Dell perspective, where does my term rpc regular performance computing and, and HPC begin? Are you seeing people build stuff on kind of general purpose clusters also? >>Well, sure, I mean, you can run a, a good amount of artificial acceleration on, you know, high core count CPUs without acceleration, and you can do it with P C I E accelerators and then, then you can do it with some of the, the, the very specific high performance accelerators like that, the intel, you know, data center, Max GPUs or NVIDIAs a 100 or H 100. So there are these scale up opportunities. I mean, if you think about, >>You know, >>Our mission to democratize compute, not just hpc, but general compute is about making it easier for customers to implement, to get the value out of what they're trying to do. So we focus on that with, you know, reference designs or validated designs that take out a good amount of time that customers would have to do it on their own, right? We can cut by six to 12 months the ability for customers in, in, I'm gonna use an HPC example and then I'll come back to your, your regular performance compute by us doing the work us, you know, setting, you know, determining the configuration, determining the software packages, testing it, tuning it so that by the time it gets to the customer, they get to take advantage of the expertise of Dell Engineers Dell Scale and they are ready to go in a much faster point of view. >>The challenge with AI is, and you talk to customers, is they all know what it can lead to and the benefits of it. Sometimes they just dunno how to start. We are trying to make it easier for customers to start, whether it is using regular RPC or you know, non optimized, non specialized compute, or as you move up the value stack into compute capability, our goal is to make it easier for customers to start to get on their journey and to get to what they're trying to do faster. So where do I see, you know, regular performance compute, you know, it's, it's, you know, they go hand in hand, right? As you think about what customers are trying to do. And I think a lot of customers, like we talked about, don't actually think about what they're trying to do as high performance computing. They don't think of themselves as one of those specialized institutions as their hpc, but they're on this glide path to greater and greater compute needs and greater and greater compute attributes that that merge kind of regular performance computing and high performance computing to where it's hard to really draw the line, especially when you get to data driven HPC data's everywhere >>And so much data. And it sounds like a lot people are very early in this journey. From our conversation with Travis, I mean five AI programs per very large company or less at this point for 75% of customers, that's pretty wild. I mean you're, you're an educational coach, you're teachers, you're innovating on the hardware front, you're doing everything at Dell. Last question for you. You've been at 24 years, >>25 in this coming march. >>What has a company like that done to retain talent like you for more than two and a half decades? >>You know, for me and I, I, and I'd like to say I had an atypical journey, but I don't think I have right there, there has always been opportunity for me, right? You know, I started off as a quality engineer. A couple years later I'm living in Singapore running or you know, running services for Enterprise and apj. I come back couple years in Austin, then I'm in our Bangalore development center helping set that up. Then I come back, then I'm in our Taiwan development center helping with some of the work out there. And then I come back. There has always been the next opportunity before I could even think about am I ready for the next opportunity? Oh. And so for me, why would I leave? Right? Why would I do anything different given that there's always been the next opportunity? The other thing is jobs are what you make of it and Dell embraces that. So if there's something that needs to be done or there was an opportunity, or even in the case of our AI ML portfolio, we saw an opportunity, we reviewed it, we talked about it, and then we went all in. So that innovation, that opportunity, and then most of all the people at Dell, right? I can't ask to work with a better set of set of folks from from the top on down. >>That's fantastic. Yeah. So it's culture. >>It is culture B really, at the end of the day, it is culture. >>That's fantastic. Raja, thank you so much for being here with us. >>Thank you guys, the >>Show. >>Really appreciate it. >>Questions? Yeah, this was such a pleasure. And thank you for tuning into the Cube Live from Dallas here at Supercomputing. My name is Savannah Peterson, and we'll see y'all in just a little bit.