Tech giant Dell unveiled the latest addition to their 13^th generation PowerEdge server portfolio this week in the form of the new PowerEdge C6320. The newest member of the PowerEdge family is designed to “push the boundaries of high-performance computing and big data” and delivers up to two times performance improvement on the leading HPC performance benchmark. With just the right mix of cost-efficient compute and storage housed in a compact, 2U chassis, it is the ideal server to for customers looking to meet the needs of a demanding workload.

The new PowerEdge C6320 is able to solidly outperform its predecessor with the help of Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 server chips and up to 72TB of local storage. Intel’s new Xeon chips, which were released last year, support up to 18 cores per socket. The new PowerEdge model is able to offer up to 144 cores inside each 2U chassis and 512GB of SSR4 memory per node, in addition to the 72TB of internal storage. Going one step further, the PowerEdge comes with Dell’s latest Remote Access Controller (iDRAC8) in an effort to address the needs of enterprise IT departments. This integrated Remote Access Controller allows IT staff to automate multiple routine management chores, which reduces the time and elimination processes normally associated with deploying, monitoring and updating servers. And since it’s already embedded, no operating system or hypervisor is needed.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), sales of hyper-converged systems are expected to increase an astounding 116.2 percent in 2015 over the previous year. Given those predictions, it stands to reason that Dell made the move to actually pull some of their mainstream products out of the datacenter solution and focus on the creation of the PowerEdge C6320. Executive director of product management and product strategy for Dell Server Solutions Brian Payne says of the trend “We’re seeing hyperconverged appliances go into mainstream IT. Mainstream IT is very different from the way they operate in web tech and hyperconverged [organizations].” If their first publicly satisfied customer is any indication, then it appears that Dell is on the right track. Recently, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California used seven racks of PowerEdge C6320 systems totaling 1,944 nodes (or 46,656 cores) to create Comet, its new petascale supercomputer. After working with the C6320 for some time now, HPC systems manager Rick Wagner at the San Diego Supercomputer Center reports that “It’s a big platform, but it’s designed to support as many people as possible to get their science done as quickly as possible,” adding that “Comet has the capacity to run up to 50,000 jobs at once if they are utilizing only a single core”. Comet now provides a five-fold increase in compute capacity over SDSC’s previous HPC system, which is a huge step forward for HPC. Dell has yet to reveal a release date or price for the high-powered new server.