Case Study: Oregon State University achieves accelerated scientific research and flexible high-performance computing with Dell Technologies

University capitalizes on Dell EMC servers with AMD processors in a highly heterogeneous environment

Oregon State University’s Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing (CGRB) needed versatile, high‑performance compute clusters to accelerate diverse, data‑intensive research workloads. Dell Technologies supported that mission by supplying Dell EMC PowerEdge servers (including R7425 and legacy R815 systems) equipped with AMD EPYC and Opteron processors and Dell Force10 networking to operate inside CGRB’s purposely heterogeneous HPC environment.

Dell Technologies’ Dell EMC hardware—integrated via partners such as AHPC—gave CGRB a scalable, mixed‑architecture cluster that today spans about 5,000 processors and roughly 5 petabytes of usable storage, with AMD‑based systems making up ~70% of the estate. The AMD EPYC‑powered PowerEdge nodes delivered notably better threaded performance versus Intel in key workloads, helped contain HPC costs, improved uptime and flexibility, and enabled faster scientific research while the Force10 networking (moving from 40Gb to 100Gb) keeps large data flows moving—demonstrating measurable gains tied to Dell Technologies’ solution.

Oregon State University

Christopher Sullivan

Assistant Director for Biocomputing, Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing