What Did Dell Have to Do with Curiosity the Mars Rover?

Dell apparently had a hand in sending Curiosity to Mars, or at least in getting it to the red planet’s surface in one piece.  According to a fresh release that the company must have just been itching to publish this week, NASA used Dell’s PowerEdge servers to power the two High Performance Computing clusters that helped the rover land safely.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California is home to Galaxy and Nebula, the two clusters that analyzed atmospheric data and other information to fine tune the landing sequences. The parameters were actually developed by a group of scientists, but they ran it on the HPC environment for validation purposes before uploading it to Curiosity.

Jere Carroll, general manager of civilian agencies for Dell’s federal business, released a statement that is appreciably successful at making the most out of the occasion.

“We’re proud to work hand-in-hand with NASA, a true American institution that provides the world with the understanding that modern day pioneering delivers optimism and the drive to go further. This notion echoes Dell’s mission to provide customers with a full spectrum of IT hardware and services, helping them to accomplish their mission more effectively and efficiently.”

Dell had another significant, albeit not as buzzworthy update this week. It rolled out the latest addition to its partner program, a certification set named Cloud Services Enabler. It is one of three and allows service providers to mix and match Dell cloud technology and offer the integrated bundle as a service.

Last month the hardware giant became that much more invested in the analytics space with a data retention solution that is made available in several different configurations. Customers can either use the offering as-is, or upgrade it with better hardware and Cloudera’s Hadoop platform to fulfill a wider range of uses.