HPC at Intel: about 80% of the company's 100,000 servers

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Last week PCWorld reported on comments made by Intel CIO Diane Bryant. Bryant was mostly talking about her company’s IT consolidation effort, which has already cut the number of datacenters operated by the company from 147 to “around 70”

Intel logoIntel hopes to save $250 million between 2007 to 2015 by cutting costs associated with data centers, including cooling, system maintenance and support. A four-year refresh cycle for servers, which started in 2007, is already helping the company reduce such expenditure, Bryant said.

Interesting, but the part I was interested in was her comments on the relative split of computing at Intel

The company is also using technologies to squeeze out maximum server performance by maintaining high utilization rates. Intel has about 100,000 total servers, of which 80,000 are in the high-performance computing environment. Intel looks for an 85 percent utilization rate in the HPC environment without overloading the servers, Bryant said. The company has 20,000 “office” servers for normal tasks, where the company maintains a 65 percent utilization rate for maximum efficiency.