H-P, Intel get golden opportunity at NREL
The $10 million system will be housed at the Energy Systems Integration Facility, under construction on NREL's campus in Golden.
The new system will expand NREL's modeling and simulation capabilities as it researches solar photovoltaics, wind energy, electric vehicles, buildings technologies and renewable fuels.
The computer system's petascale computing capability (1 million billion calculations per second) will be the world's largest that is dedicated solely to renewable energy and energy efficiency research.
"This unique capability sets NREL apart in our ability to continue groundbreaking research and analysis," said Dan Arvizu, NREL's director "In partnership with H-P and Intel, NREL is acquiring one of the most energy efficient, high-performance computer systems in the world for our research."
The center is designed to be the world's most energy efficient, with an annualized average power usage effectiveness, or PUE, rating of 1.06 or better. The average data center operates with a PUE of 1.91, according to 2009 data from the Environmental Protection Agency's EnergyStar Program.
NREL's data-center project features a technology, currently under development, that uses warm water in the computing rack to efficiently cool the servers. The heat from the computer system will be used as the primary heat source in the facility's offices and lab space. Excess heat can also be exported to adjacent buildings and other areas of the NREL campus.
The system will include scalable H-P ProLiant SL230s and SL250s Generation 8 servers based on eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors as well as the next generation of servers featuring future 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture-based Intel Xeon processors and Intel Many Integrated Core architecture-based Intel Xeon Phi co-processors.
The first phase of the high-performance computer installation will begin in November, reaching petascale capacity in the summer of 2013.
H-P and Intel were selected after a competitive, open procurement process.
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