Dell Technologies Inc. is expanding its AI Factory in announcements being made today at the SC24 high-performance computing conference in Atlanta.

The AI Factory is intended to help organizations adopt and scale up artificial intelligence across their operations by deploying an integrated set of infrastructure, software and services including Nvidia Corp. AI infrastructure and software.

Dell is expanding its Integrated Rack Scalable Systems to include the PowerEdge XE9685L and PowerEdge XE7740 servers in a standard 19-inch enclosure called the Dell Integrated Rack 5000. Both will be available in the first quarter of next year.

The IRSS program is a turnkey factory integration program that delivers fully loaded, rack-scale systems with a choice of water or air cooling and centralized service and support options for the entire rack. The IR5000 is designed to support high-density applications in a space-efficient form factor, delivering high performance and energy efficiency.

The PowerEdge XE9685L is a dense, 4U liquid-cooled server designed for AI, machine learning, high-performance computing and other data-intensive workloads. It features dual 5^th Gen Advanced Micro Devices Inc. EPYC central processing units paired with the Nvidia HGX H200 graphics processing unit or Nvidia B200 platforms.

There are up to 12 Peripheral Component Interconnect Express slots, optimized storage connectivity and maximum input/output speed. Each rack can accommodate up to 96 Nvidia GPUs per rack. With support for 196 CPU cores and 96 GPUs, the new server will provide the industry’s highest GPU density, said Arunkumar Narayanan, senior vice president of server and networking products at Dell.

“We will integrate all of this in the factory so all the customer needs to do is have the rack delivered and plug it in,” he said. “The liquid cooling will be set up, the air-cooled servers will be set up, and the entire thing will work as one solution. If there’s any issue, there’s a single support call to Dell and Dell will manage the entire estate of issues.”

The 4U air-cooled PowerEdge XE7740 uses dual Intel Corp. Xeon 6 processors using Intel Performance Cores and up to eight double-wide accelerators — including Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators or the Nvidia H200 NVL Tensor Core GPUs — or up to 16 single-wide accelerators, such as the Nvidia L4 Tensor Core GPU. P-Cores are a type of processor core optimized for high-performance and intensive workloads.

New platform doubles the GPU capacity of the predecessor R760X, said Arunkumar Narayanan, senior vice president of server and networking products at Dell. “We expect this to be our most successful platform in this AI enterprise inferencing category,” he said.

Dell also said it plans to support the upcoming Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell NVL4 Superchip with a new PowerEdge XE server designed for its Integrated Rack 7000, a liquid cooled high-density computing infrastructure with scalable power management announced last month. The IR 7000 supports up to 144 GPUs per rack in a 50OU standard rack.

Updates to the Dell Data Lakehouse, announced earlier this year, add Apache Spark support for distributed data processing at scale, providing a unified approach for data analytics, management, processing and analysis.

Updates to the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia add support for Nvidia’s HGX H200 and H100NVL to deliver up to 1.9 times higher performance than the Nvidia HGX H100. This enables users to perform more complex queries and accelerate retrieval-augmented generation operations leveraging PowerEdge, Dell PowerScale and Nvidia AI Enterprise software and generative AI tools.

New Validated Designs for AI PCs, available now, are open-source guides designed to boost the development of AI applications on Dell AI PCs with neural processing unit technology. Developers can customize the modular designs to integrate features like large language models, vision, text and speech into applications that can be deployed across multiple platforms, regardless of processor.

Dell is also expanding its line of professional services to include sustainable data centers, data management services, AI networking services and assistance implementing ServiceNow Inc.’s Now Assist, a generative AI-powered product that uses generative AI to improve productivity and workflow efficiency.

Image: Dell on X