 Howdy y'all and welcome to Dallas, where we're proud to be alive from Supercomputing 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 Vihill. Travis, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. How you feeling? I'm feeling like an exciting visionary. That's the idea, that's why we tear you up for that. Great. So tell us, Dell had some huge announcements last night, and you get to break it to the CUBE 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, NVIDIA, 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 a haven for hardware nerds. Like, well, I'll include you in this group. It sounds like a brand. Yes, oh yeah, absolutely. And I know David is as well. Someone else on the street. Oh, big time, big time hardware nerd. And just to be clear, for the kids that will be watching these videos. Yes. Are you talking about Alienware gaming systems? No. Right, so. They're yay big, yay tall, 200 pounds. Give us a price point on one of these things. Retail, suggested retail price? I'm not. More than 10 grand? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Try another order of magnitude. So yeah, yeah. So this is the most exciting stuff from an infrastructure perspective that you can imagine. 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 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 enterprise level AI, it's really, 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? And so at the end of the day, 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, the same things that research scientists and universities have been trying to do forever with HPC, I want to do it on an industrial scale. But I want to do it in a way that's more open, more flexible. 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 provide, 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 versus months. That's a lot, 18 times faster. I just want to emphasize that. 18 times faster. And we're talking about orders of magnitude and whatnot up here. That makes a huge difference in what people are able to do. Absolutely. And so I mean, 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 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? Because we've been talking about AI and ML for a while. You mentioned kind of the leading edge of academia and supercomputing and HPC, what that conjures up in people's minds. Do you have any numbers or any thoughts about where we are in this cycle? How many people are actually doing this in production versus experimenting at this point? 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-reported saying we're not doing it right yet. And another good stat is three quarters of customers have fewer than five AI applications deployed at scale in their IT environments today. So I think we're on the, 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 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, it's, 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 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 and people would actually know what it is. You're working with us. We actually unveiled it. There was a sheet on it and we actually unveiled it last night. Did you get a lot of ooze and awes? You know, you said this was a show for hardware nerds. It's been a long time since I've been at a show where people cheer and ooze and awes when you take the sheet off the hardware. And yes, yes, it happened. And the reveal, you had your moment. Exactly, exactly, our three new systems. Speaking of ooze and awes, 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? 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, exciting. You can talk to your friends about it at dinner parties and things like that. I'm like, nice to stuff. Curing cancer. Marvel movie. At home? Cred goes to the Marvel movie. But you know, what really excites me is the variety of applications that AI is being used in. Healthcare, on a serious note, healthcare genomics, a huge and growing application area. That excites me. Doing good in the world is something that's very important to Dell. Sustainability is something that's very important to Dell. So any application related to that is exciting to me. And then, just pragmatically speaking, anything that helps our customers make better business decisions excites me. So we're just at the beginning of what I refer to as this rolling thunder of CPU next generation releases. Recently from AMD, in the near future, it'll be Intel joining the party, going back and forth, back and forth. Along with that, Gen 5, PCIe at the motherboard level, it's very easy to look at it and say, wow, previous gen, wow, double, double, double. It is double. 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 is going to be not a doubling, but a 4x or 8x in a lot of cases. So the quantity of compute from these new systems is going to be, 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, 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 based on current technology, just doing it more better, faster, cheaper? Or do we need this leap to quantum computing to get there? Yeah, look, I think we're, and I was having some really interesting conversations with customers that 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, I think we're a ways off still. And in order to make quantum computing work, you still need to have classical computing surrounding. Number one, number two, with the advances that we're seeing generation on generation with this, what has moved from a kind of a three year, 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, 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 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 that are starting to roll out now and in the near future, that's why it's really an exciting time. I think that those numbers are going to support your point 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 for half the amount of power, boom. And it's done. Exactly, it's a TCO conversation. It's a no-brainer. It gets to the point where 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. Right, and the power is such a huge component of this. It's huge, huge. Our customer, I mean, it's always a huge issue, but our customers, especially in Amia, what's going on over there are saying, I need to upgrade because I need to be more energy efficient. Yeah. Yeah, we were talking about 20 years from now, so you've been at Dell over 18 years. Yeah, it'll be 19 in May. Congratulations, what commitment. So 19 years from now in your second Dell career, 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? Yeah, I love this as an arbitrary number, too. This is great. 38-year Dell career. Yeah, that might be a record. And if you'd like to share the winners of Super Bowls and World Series in advance, like the Sports Almanac from Back to the Future, so we can place our bets. But any, yeah, I mean this is, what do you think? AI, what's AI going to deliver in the next decade? Yeah, look, I mean there are global issues that advances in computing power will help us solve. And 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. 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, a digital twin of a factory for a car manufacturer. And they were saying that it used to be you had to build the factory, you had to put the people in the factory, you had to run cars through the factory to figure out sort of how you optimize and where everything's placed. Yeah. They don't have to do that anymore. They can do it all via simulation, all via digital copy of analog reality. And so, I mean, I think the possibilities are endless. And, you know, 19 years ago, I had no idea I'd be sitting here so excited about hardware. Here we are, baby. I think 19 years from now, hardware still matters. You know, hardware still matters. I know software eats the world, but hardware still matters, got around something. 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. Can you believe that, one terabyte? Because when you've been around long enough, it's like, that's insane. You know, like, I've been to NASA, I live in Texas, I've been to NASA a couple of times. You know, they talk about, they sent people to the moon on way less than that. On way far less than our pocket computers. It's amazing. NASA's here too. I am an optimist on where we're going. Clearly, and we're clearly an exciting visionary. Like we said, we set up 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. 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.