Intel
Corporation(NASDAQ:INTC) and Hewlett-Packard Company(NYSE:HPQ) have entered
into an alliance to build a new supercomputing system for the US Department of
Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory that promises to be one of the
most competent installations in the world.
The latest system will
be powered by a combination of present 32nm Xeon E5 processors and upcoming
22nm Ivy Bridge processors that was based on Intel’s MIC architecture, running
inside HP servers.
The total peak
performance of the system is predicted to exceed 1 Petaflop and it will
definitely be the largest supercomputer dedicated entirely on renewable energy.
The installation will
not use conventional compressor-based or mechanical cooling systems. It will
use warm water liquid cooling technology instead to increase the reuse of
heating power. This cooling system along with innovative data centre design and
is predicted to end up being the world’s most efficient data centre, with a PUE
rating of at least 1.06.
NREL Computational
Science director, Steve Hammond said that at NREL, people have taken holistic
approach to sustainable computing. The
updated system will let NREL to increase the computational capabilities while being
heedful of energy and water used in the process.
Claims were made by
NREL that the inclusion of Intel Xeon Phi co-processors is the solution to make
the performance and facility energy efficient. NREL has taken part in the
software development for MIC architecture of Intel and discovered that it took
only a couple of days to port half a million lines of code with the help of
Intel Xeon Phi cores.
John Michalakes, NREL
scientist said that modeling the wind energy system to turbine scales to
meteorological scales accounts for squeezing every last bit of performance from
simulations. The capability of developing and optimizing the same software
ecosystem as the host Intel Xeon processor is a huge advance for application
scaling, programmer productivity and scaling.
The NREL system is
slated for completion in the summer season of 2013.
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