University of Alabama Builds Statewide High Performance Computing Center on Dell and NVIDIA Infrastructure
Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County, Alabama — Dell Technologies announced on November 11 that the University of Alabama's new High Performance Computing Center will run on Dell high performance computing, super intelligence (SI) and data infrastructure at its core, providing large-scale computing and research data support for researchers across the state.
The center is designed as a shared statewide resource. Beyond the campuses of the University of Alabama System, it opens collaboration opportunities to other academic institutions, government agencies and industry partners throughout Alabama. Research fields it supports include water resource management, materials and manufacturing, health, national security and quantum computing, and it will also provide computing infrastructure for the university's new School of Data Science. The university has described the facility as a petascale computing system, intended to give researchers in the state local access to computing capabilities that have historically been available primarily through national laboratories and major federal computing facilities.
Technically, the environment combines Dell PowerEdge servers with NVIDIA AI infrastructure. Dell PowerEdge R770 and XE7740 systems equipped with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition and NVIDIA H200 NVL GPUs are connected by NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, with Dell PowerScale and the Dell AI Data Platform providing file storage, and Dell HPC Deployment Services supporting implementation of the overall environment. Dell's relationship with the University of Alabama spans more than two decades.
The facility is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under Federal Award No. 60NANB23D149; the University of Alabama's official page for the center carries the same award number. State of Alabama investment is also among the project's funding sources.
"This center started with a need for advanced computing at the University of Alabama, but the investment from the State of Alabama gave us an opportunity to think much bigger," said Fernanda Foertter, executive director of the University of Alabama High Performance Computing Center. "Our goal is to make advanced computing easier to access and useful to the people solving Alabama's most important research and technology problems." Fran Bogle, senior vice president at Dell Technologies, said the platform, combining HPC, AI and data infrastructure, gives researchers across Alabama the foundation for discovery, industry collaboration and long-term economic development, with the flexibility to evolve with advancements in science.
(Source: Dell Technologies)
Source: Dell Technologies
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：阿拉巴马大学高性能计算与数据中心机房效果图。阿拉巴马大学官方网站（hpc.ua.edu）。 / Photo: Rendering of the data hall at the University of Alabama High Performance Computing and Data Center. University of Alabama official website (hpc.ua.edu).
