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>> Howdy you all, and welcome to Dallas
where we're proud to be live from Super Computing 2022.
My name is Savannah Peterson,
joined here by my co-host, David, on theCUBE.
And our first guest today is a very exciting visionary.
He's a leader at Dell.
Please welcome Travis Vigil.
Travis, thank you so much for being here.
>> Thank you so much for having me.
>> Savannah: How you feeling?
>> I'm feeling like an exciting visionary.
>> You are. (laughs)
That's, that's the idea.
It's why we tee you up for that.
>> Great.
>> So tell us, Dell had some huge announcements...
>> Yes.
>> last night.
And you get to break it to theCUBE audience.
Give us the rundown.
>> Yeah, it's a really big show for Dell.
We announced a brand new suite of GPU enabled servers.
Eight ways, four ways, direct liquid cooling.
Really the first time in the history
of the portfolio that we've had
this much coverage across Intel, AMD, Invidia.
Getting great reviews from the show floor.
I had the chance earlier to be
in the whisper suite to actually look at the gear.
Customers are buzzing over it.
That's one thing I love about this show is the gear is here.
>> Yes, it is.
It is a haven for hardware nerds.
>> Yes.
>> Like, well I'll include you in this group-
>> Yes.
>> But it sounds like grand.
>> Oh, Yeah, absolutely.
>> And I know David is as well.
So no-
>> Big, big time. Big time hardware nerd.
And just to be clear
for the kids that will be watching these videos-
>> Savannah: Yes. (laughing)
>> We're not talking about alien wear gaming systems.
>> Travis: No.
>> Right, so-
>> They're yay big, yay tall, 200 pounds.
>> David: Give us a price point on one of these things.
Retail, suggested retail price.
>> Oh, I'm...
>> David: More than 10 grand?
>> Oh, yeah, yeah.
(David laughing)
Try another order of magnitude.
Yeah.
>> Yeah. So this is, this is the most exciting stuff
from an infrastructure perspective.
>> Travis: Oh, absolutely. >> You can imagine.
>> Travis: Absolutely.
>> But what is it driving?
So talk to us about where you see the world
of high performance computing with your customers.
What are they, what are they doing with this?
What do they expect to do with this stuff in the future?
>> Yeah. You know it's a real interesting time
and I know that the provenance of this show
is HPC focused but what we're seeing
and what we're hearing from our customers is
that AI workloads and traditional HPC workloads
are becoming almost indistinguishable.
You need the right mix of compute,
you need GPU acceleration,
and you need the ability to take the vast quantities
of data that are being generated
and actually gather insight from them.
And so if you look at what customers are trying to do with
you know, enterprise level AI, it's really, you know
how do I classify and categorize my data?
But more importantly, how do I make sense of it?
How do I derive insights from it?
>> Savannah: Yeah.
>> And so at the end of the day, you know,
you look at what customers are trying to do.
It's take all the various streams of data,
whether it be structured data
whether it be unstructured data,
bring it together and make decisions,
make business decisions.
And it's a really exciting time because customers
are saying, you know, the same things
that, you know, research scientists and universities
have been trying to do forever with HPC.
I want to do it on industrial scale, but I want to do it
in a way that's more open, more flexible.
You know I call it AI for the rest of us.
And customers are here and they want those systems
but they want the ecosystem
to support ease of deployment, ease of use, ease of scale.
And that's what we're providing in addition
to the systems we, we provide, you know,
Dell's one of the only providers in the industry
that can provide not only the compute
but the networking and the storage, and more importantly
the solutions that bring it all together.
Give you one example.
We have what we call a validated design for AI.
And that validated design, we put together all
of the pieces, provided the recipe for customers,
so that they can take what used to be two months
to build and run a model.
We provide that capability 18 times faster.
So we're talking about hours-
>> Wow.
>> versus months. So...
>> That's a lot 18 times faster.
I just want to emphasize that-
>> 18 times faster.
>> and we're talking about orders of magnitude-
>> Yeah.
>> and whatnot up here that makes a huge difference-
>> Absolutely.
>> in what people are able to do.
>> Absolutely. And so, I mean, we've, you know
you've been doing this for a while.
We've been talking about the deluge of data forever
but it's gotten to the point and it's, you know,
the disparity of the data, the fact that much
of it remains siloed.
Customers are demanding that we provide solutions
that allow them to bring that data together,
process it, make decisions with it.
>> So where are we in the adoption cycle?
>> Early.
>> Because we've been talking about AI and ML for a while.
>> Yeah.
>> You mentioned, you know, kind of the leading edge
of academia and super computing and HPC
and what that conjures up in people's minds.
Do you have any numbers or, you know,
any thoughts about where we are in this cycle?
How many people are actually doing this
in production versus experimenting at this point?
>> Yeah. I think it's a reason
there's so much interest in what we're doing
and so much demand for not only the systems
but the solutions that bring the systems together.
The ecosystem that brings the systems together.
We did a study recently
and asked customers where they felt they were
at in terms of deploying best practices for AI.
You know, mass deployment of AI.
Only 31% of customers said
that they felt that they, self-reported,
31% said they felt that they were deploying best practices
for their AI deployments.
So almost 70%, self reporting, saying we're not
doing it right yet.
>> Savannah: Yeah.
>> And another good stat is three quarters
of customers have fewer than five AI applications deployed
at scale in their IT environments today.
So, you know, I think we're on the, you know,
if you think about it as a traditional S curve,
I think we're at the first inflection point
and customers are asking, can I do it end to end?
Can I do it with the best of breed in terms of systems?
But Dell, can you also use an ecosystem
that I know and understand?
And I think that's, you know,
another great example of something that Dell is doing
is we have focused on ethernet as connectivity
for many of the solutions that we put together.
Again, you know, provenance of HPC, InfiniBand,
InfiniBand is a great connectivity option,
but you know, there's a lot of care
and feeding that goes along with InfiniBand
and the fact that you can do it both with Infiniband
for those, you know, government scale clusters
or university scale clusters
and more of our enterprise customers can do
it with with ethernet on premises.
It's a great option.
>> Yeah. You've got so many things going on.
I got to actually check out the million dollar
hardware that you have just casually sitting in your booth.
I feel like an event like this is probably one
of the only times you can let something like that out.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> And people would actually know what it is.
You're working with-
>> We actually unveiled it.
There was a sheet on it
and we actually unveiled it last night.
>> Did you get a lot of oos and ahs?
>> You know, you said this was a show for hardware nerds.
(Savannah and David laughing)
It's been a long time since I've been
at a show where people cheer and oo and ah
when you take the sheet off the hardware.
>> And?
>> And, yes. Yes, it happened.
>> Savannah: And reveal you had your moment.
>> Exactly, exactly.
(Savannah laughing)
Our three new systems.
>> Speaking of oos and ahs, I love that,
and I love that everyone was excited as we all are about it.
It's nice to be home with our nerds.
Speaking of applications and excitement,
you get to see a lot
of different customers across verticals.
Is there a sector or space
that has you personally most excited?
>> Oh, personally most excited, you know, for credibility
at home when the sector is media and entertainment
and the movie is one that your children have
actually seen.
That one gives me credibility.
It's exciting, you can talk to your friends
about it at dinner parties and things like that.
(Savannah laughing)
>> Unlike most the stuff.
>> Curing cancer, marvel movie.
>> At home? Cred goes to the Marvel movie.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> But, you know, what really excites me
is the variety of applications that AI
is being used in.
Healthcare, you know, on a serious note,
healthcare genomics a huge
and growing application area, that excites me.
You know, doing good in the world
is something that's very important to Dell.
You know, know sustainability is something
that's very important to Dell.
>> Savannah: Yeah.
>> So any application related to that is exciting to me.
And then, you know, just pragmatically speaking
anything that helps our customers make better
business decisions excites me.
>> So we are just at the beginning of, what I refer to
as this rolling thunder of CPU-
>> Travis: Yes.
>> next generation releases.
Recently from AMD, in the near future
it'll be Intel joining the party
>> Yeah.
>> Going back and forth, back and forth along
with that Gen five PCIE at the motherboard level
>> Travis: Yeah.
>> It's very easy to look
at it and say, wow, previous gen,
wow, double, double, double.
>> Travis: Uh-huh. It is double, double. Yeah.
>> It is. It is.
However, most of your customers,
I would guess a fair number of them,
might be not just N minus one
but N minus two looking at an upgrade.
So for a lot of people,
the upgrade season that's ahead of us-
>> Yeah
>> is going to be not a doubling
but a four x or eight x in a lot of cases.
>> Yes. Yeah, yeah.
>> So the quantity of compute
from these new systems is going to be a,
it's going to be a massive increase
from where we've been in the recent past
like as in last Tuesday.
So is there, you know
this is sort of a philosophical question
we talked a little earlier
about this idea of the quantitative
versus qualitative difference in computing horsepower.
Do we feel like we're
at a point where there's going to be an inflection
in terms of what AI can actually deliver?
>> Travis: Yeah.
>> Based on current technology
just doing it more, better, faster cheaper?
>> Travis: Yeah.
>> Or do we need this leap
to quantum computing to get there?
>> Yeah. I look, I think we're,
and I was having some really interesting conversations
with customers whose job it is to run very,
very large, very, very complex clusters.
And we're talking a little bit about quantum computing.
Interesting thing about quantum computing is, you know
I think we're a ways off still,
and in order to make quantum computing work,
you still need to have classical computing surrounding-
>> David: Right.
>> number one. Number two, with the advances that
we're seeing generation on generation
with this, you know,
what has moved from a, kind of a three year, you know
call it a two to three year upgrade cycle,
to something that, because of all
of the technology that's being deployed
into the industry, is almost more continuous upgrade cycle.
I'm personally optimistic that we are on
the cusp of a new level of infrastructure modernization.
And it's not just the computing power,
it's not just the increases in GPUs,
it's not, you know, those things are important
but it's things like power consumption, right?
One of the ways that customers can do better
in terms of power consumption
and sustainability is by modernizing infrastructure.
Looking, to your point, a lot
of people are running N minus one, N minus two.
The stuff that's coming out now
is much more energy efficient.
And so I think there's a lot of vectors
that we're seeing in the market.
Whether it be technology innovation,
whether it be be a drive for energy efficiency,
whether it be the rise of AI and ML,
whether it be all of the new silicon that's coming
into the portfolio where customers are going to have
a continuous reason to upgrade.
I mean, that's my thought. What do you think?
>> Yeah, no, I think that the objective numbers
that are going to be rolling out-
>> Yeah.
>> that are starting to roll out now and in the near future.
That's why it's really an exciting time.
>> Travis: Yeah.
>> I think those numbers are going to support your point.
>> Travis: Yeah.
>> Because people will look and they'll say
wait a minute, it used to be a dollar, but now it's $2.
That's more expensive.
Yeah, but you're getting 10 times as much...
>> Travis: Yeah.
>> for half of the amount of power. Boom.
And it's done. >> Exactly.
>> And it's done. And it's done.
>> Exactly. It's a TCO no brainer.
>> It gets to the point where it's, you look at this rack
of amazing stuff that you have a personal relationship with
and you say, I can't afford to keep you plugged in anymore.
>> Yeah.
>> And.
>> Right, the power is such a huge component of this.
>> Yeah. It's huge, huge.
Our customer, I mean it's always a huge issue,
but our customers, especially in AMEA,
what's going on over there are saying, I, you know,
I need to upgrade because I need
to be more energy efficient.
>> David: Yeah.
>> Yeah. I, we were talking about 20 years from now,
so you've been at Dell over 18 years.
>> Travis: Yeah. It'll be 19 in May.
>> Congratulations. What commitment.
So 19 years from now in your second Dell career.
>> Travis: Yeah.
>> What are we going to be able to say then
that perhaps we can't say now?
>> Oh my gosh. Wow. 19 years from now?
>> Savannah: Yeah.
I love this as an arbitrary number too.
This is great.
>> Yeah.
(Savannah laughs)
38 year Dell career.
>> Savannah: Yeah. (laughs)
That might be a record.
>> Yeah.
>> And if you'd like to share the winners
of the Super Bowls-
>> Yeah.
>> and World Series in advance
like the world and the sports element act
from back to the future so we can-
>> And the power ball. And the power ball.
>> place our bets. >> 1.9 bil.
>> But, but any, yeah, I mean this is
what do you think AI... >> Exactly.
>> what's AI going to deliver in the decade?
>> Yeah, look, I mean, there are, you know,
global issues that advances in computing power
will help us solve.
And, you know, the models that are being built,
the ability to generate a digital copy of
the analog world and be able to run models
and simulations on it, is amazing.
>> Savannah: Truly.
>> Yeah. You know, I was looking at some, you know,
it's a very simple and pragmatic thing,
but I think it's an example of what could be.
We were with one of our technology providers
and they were showing us a digital simulation,
you know, a digital twin
of a factory for a car manufacturer.
And they were saying that, you know, it used to
be you had to build the factory,
you had to put the people in the factory,
you had to, you know, run cars through the factory
to figure out sort of how you optimize
and, you know, where everything's placed.
>> Yeah.
>> They don't have to do that anymore.
>> Savannah: No.
>> Right? They can do it all via simulation,
all via digital, you know, copy of analog reality.
And so, I mean, I think the, you know,
the possibilities are endless.
And, you know, 19 years ago,
I had no idea I'd be sitting here
(David and Savannah laughing)
so excited about hardware, you know-
>> Savannah: Here we are, baby. (laughs)
>> I think 19 years from now, hardware still matters.
>> Yeah.
>> You know, hardware still matters.
I know software eats the world
but the hardware still matters.
Got to run on something.
>> Yeah.
>> And we'll be talking about, you know,
that same type of example
but at a broader and more global scale.
>> Well I'm the knucklehead
who keeps waving his phone around going,
"There's one terabyte in here.
(all laughing)
Can you believe that? One terabyte?" (laughs)
Because when you've been around long enough.
It's like- >> Yeah. Well-
>> It's insane.
>> You know, like I've been to NASA.
I live in Texas, I've been to NASA a couple times.
You know, they talk about, they sent, you know,
they sent people to the moon on...
>> David: Oh, way less than that.
>> Far less...
>> Savannah: On far less in our pocket computers.
It's amazing.
>> I am an optimist on where we're going.
>> Clearly and we're clearly an exciting visionary.
>> Exactly. >> Like we said at the gate.
It's no surprise that people are using Dell's tech
to realize their AI ecosystem dreams.
Travis, thank you so much for being here with us
>> Travis: Thank you.
>> David, always a pleasure.
And thank you for tuning
in to theCUBE Live from Dallas, Texas.
My name is Savannah Peterson.
We'll be back with more super computing soon.
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