Dell LinuxWorld News

NCSA SELECTS DELL FOR LARGE-SCALE SUPERCOMPUTING CLUSTER TO DRIVE ADVANCED
RESEARCH

Cluster Promises to Rank Among the World's Most Powerful Systems

SAN FRANCISCO, LINUXWORLD, Aug. 4, 2003 - Dell has been selected by the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to provide more than 1,450 servers that will
perform computations and data analysis for researchers across the U.S. to
better understand major scientific and engineering questions of the 21st
century.

Research conducted on NCSA systems includes: studying the evolution, size
and structure of the universe, investigating theories on the lifecycle of
stars like the Sun, modeling severe storms, studying the human genome and
biological processes, advancing the drug design process and more.

The Dell PowerEdge servers will be linked to form a high-performance
computing cluster (HPCC) with a theoretical peak performance of 17.7
trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS) that promises to rank
among the world's most powerful systems.  Such performance capabilities
would rank this cluster as the world's third most powerful system on the Top
500 List of supercomputers (www.top500.org) and will increase NCSA's total
computing power to close to 24 TFLOPS.

As one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's
Supercomputer Centers Program, NCSA's reputation and leadership in
high-performance computing, networking and developing innovative software
applications is world-renowned.  NCSA, a long-time advocate of distributed
computing infrastructures for supercomputing, selected Dell for its largest
cluster because of the performance, support and value of Dell HPCC
solutions.

"NCSA's reputation rests on being a leader in cutting-edge supercomputing
for science and engineering research and in developing new computing
technologies and infrastructure," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA.  "We are
pioneering new performance capabilities for standards-based clusters and
supercomputing applications.  Dell was able to provide excellent performance
and value through its products, programs and partnerships to further these
efforts."

"The new NCSA cluster shows Dell's ability to deliver cutting-edge solutions
at the highest-end of enterprise computing," said John Mullen, vice
president, Dell Higher Education.  "Dell's HPCC solutions offer
high-performance at approximately 10 percent of the cost of a proprietary
platform - a value proposition that continues to be well-received in
academia and government organizations, and in global corporations."

About NCSA's Cluster

NCSA's main computational cluster uses 1,280 dual Intel Xeon 3.05 processor
PowerEdge 1750 servers that will be networked with Myrinet 2000 high-speed
interconnects and running Red Hat Linux.  This will be supported with 106
PowerEdge servers providing I/O services with 120 TB of storage and 64-node
Myrinet networked cluster for applications testing and development.

Platform Computing software will provide central management of the computing
resources in the cluster, and manage the users' job submissions and
executions.  Dell OpenManage software will monitor the health and the
utilization of all the systems in the cluster.

The Dell cluster is scheduled to be operational at NCSA's facilities in the
fall of 2003.  For more information regarding Dell HPCC program please
visit: http://www.dell.com/hpcc Visit http://www.ncsa.edu for more
information on NCSA.

About Dell
Dell Inc. (Nasdaq:  DELL) is a premier provider of products and services
required for customers worldwide to build their information-technology and
Internet infrastructures.  Company revenue for the past four quarters
totaled $36.9 billion.  Dell, through its direct business model, designs,
manufactures and customizes products and services to customer requirements,
and offers an extensive selection of software and peripherals.  Information
on Dell and its products can be obtained at www.dell.com.

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