Dell Technologies Inc. is pitching a new open-source software suite it created in partnership with Intel Corp. and Arizona State University as a way for customers to manage the convergence of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and data analytics workloads more easily.

The Omnia software stack announced today is meant to automate the provisioning and management of HPC, AI and data analytics by creating a single pool of flexible data center infrastructure resources that can sustain diverse workloads.

Available now, Omnia is essentially a set of Ansible playbooks, or blueprints of automation tasks that can be performed by software without human intervention. The playbooks can be used to speed up the deployment of converged workloads managed by Kubernetes and Slurm, as well as library frameworks, services and applications, Dell said. Kubernetes is orchestration software for containers that host the components of modern applications, while Slurm is an open-source, fault-tolerant and scalable cluster management and job scheduling system for large and small Linux clusters.

Omnia works by automatically imprinting a software solution onto each server that has been assigned to the workload in question. Dell said that helps reduce time to deployment from days to just minutes for a wide range of converged workloads, such as HPC simulations, neural networks for AI or in-memory graphics processing for data analytics.

“As AI with HPC and data analytics converge, storage and networking configurations have remained in silos, making it challenging for IT teams to provide required resources for shifting demands,” said Peter Manca, senior vice president of integrated solutions at Dell Technologies. “With Dell’s Omnia open-source software, teams can dramatically simplify the management of advanced computing workloads, helping them speed research and innovation.”

In related news, Dell said it’s expanding its HPC on Demand services and Dell EMC PowerEdge server line to support VMware virtualization environments. Dell’s HPC on Demand service provides customers with cloud-based access to its PowerEdge R server systems on a pay-as-you-go basis, so they can pay only for what they use.

By adding support for VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud Director and VMware vRealize Operations, Dell said, customers can now adopt a hybrid cloud operating model for resource-intensive HPC workloads.

Dell said running VMware on its HPC on demand servers will enable customers to tackle a range of new data-intensive workloads, including product development simulations and genome sequencing. Mercury Marine, the marine engine division of Brunswick Corp., has already adopted Dell’s HPC on demand infrastructure for its computer-aided hydrodynamic simulations to create new propulsion systems. It reckons that using Dell’s infrastructure enabled it to slash simulation times from 48 hours to under two hours.

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

At the same time, Dell said today, its R Systems customers will now have access to more powerful hardware. That’s because it has added Nvidia A30 and Nvidia A10 Tensor Core graphics processing units as options for its PowerEdge R750, R750xa and R7525 servers.

The Nvidia A30GPUs are designed to handle data-intensive AI inference tasks and mainstream enterprise compute workloads. Meanwhile, the Nvidia A10 GPUs are targeted at mixed AI and graphics workloads. Both options are available starting today.

Images: Dell