Top 500 - Dell Cluster Presence Growing

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO ADDS SECOND DELL CLUSTER TO TRACK GREAT LAKES
POLLUTION, FUEL GENERAL RESEARCH

Dell Increases Presence on Top 500 List of Supercomputers with
High-Performance Clusters

ROUND ROCK, Texas, Nov. 20, 2002 - The University at Buffalo, The State
University of New York has added a 300-node Dell high-performance computing
cluster (HPCC) to its Center for Computational Research (CCR).

The increased computing capacity will assist with various scientific
research projects, including groundwater modeling to help predict the flow
of contaminants in large bodies of water such as the Great Lakes,
computational chemistry and molecular structure determination.

It is the second Dell cluster at the university, adding to the 2,000-node
HPCC deployed earlier this year to support research in the university's
Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics.
CCR, the eighth largest supercomputing site in the world, underscores how
standards-based computing systems can perform at high levels for complex
research.  The 300-node cluster recently achieved 2.004 trillion
floating-point operations per second (Teraflops) of sustained performance in
the LINPACK benchmark test.

"Many of our scientists need to exploit a large number of processors
operating in a coordinated fashion to jointly solve leading-edge scientific
problems that could not be solved in a reasonable amount of time on smaller
systems," said Russ Miller, Ph.D., director of the CCR and UB distinguished
professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "Efficient
massively parallel processing techniques can be applied to many scientific
problems in order to provide cost-effective solutions via clusters based on
standard components.  A machine like the Pentium 4-based Dell cluster will
be used to dramatically reduce the time to solve problems, in many cases
from months to hours."

The University at Buffalo and many other organizations are increasingly
choosing HPCC solutions for data intensive analysis as an alternative to
proprietary supercomputers.  The latest Top 500 List of supercomputers
(www.top500.org) indicates that Dell clusters have a cumulative performance
of 6.046 TFLOPS, up from 856 Gigaflops (GFLOPS) in the previous list.

The new supercomputing cluster at the University at Buffalo is the
highest-ranking Dell system on the list at number 22.  Other ranking Dell
clusters include: Sandia National Labs (32), Cornell Theory Center (88),
University of Utah (89), Penn State University (174), Swineburne University
(180), a 100-node configuration of the University at Buffalo's first cluster
(187), Dell (207) and the University of Notre Dame (461).

A key reason for the popularity of HPCC for supercomputing applications is
the ability to deploy solutions based on standardized technologies at a
fraction of the cost of a proprietary supercomputer.
"Dell's supercomputing clusters enable customers to scale as they grow, as
opposed to paying for overcapacity in the legacy supercomputing model," said
Russ Holt, vice president and general manager of Dell's Enterprise Systems
Group.  "The ability to add power and capacity to address demand is very
attractive to customers, and very cost-effective."

About the University at Buffalo Cluster
The University at Buffalo's second cluster is comprised of 300 Dell
PowerEdge 2650 servers, each with dual Intel Xeon Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz
processors running Red Hat Linux.  A fully connected Myrinet 2000
high-speed, low latency interconnect network completes the balanced
standards-based supercomputer.

CCR researchers will use the cluster for work ranging from groundwater
modeling, protein folding, molecular structure determination and
computational chemistry to environmental engineering, computational fluid
dynamics and materials science.

About Dell
Dell Computer Corporation (Nasdaq: DELL) is a premier provider of products
and services required for customers worldwide to build their
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