High End At Low PricesHigh End At Low Prices

Dell last week introduced a standardized bundle of two-way Intel Xeon-powered servers, switches, and host channel adapters to drive down the cost of high-performance computing, a niche market willing to pay a premium for customized configurations.

Dell may be ready for the high-performance market with its commodity-components approach, but it remains to be seen whether the market is ready, says Gartner research VP John Enck. "This is another step toward the standardization of the high-performance computing cluster market," he says. "Dell is seeing volume-selling opportunities in that space, but it doesn't mean that the entire space is ready to be commoditized."

Many scientists and researchers who depend on high-performance clusters still want specific configurations that Dell and its top-tier competitors Hewlett-Packard and IBM don't provide cheaply, Enck says.

Dell's bundle, which runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, starts at $55,000.