NASA Doubles Down With Dell Westmere Super

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The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) newest computational tool went online this month. Dubbed “Discover,” this 14,400-processor Dell PowerEdge C6100 cluster features 320 TFLOPs of power.

Our vendor partners Dell, Intel, Mellanox, Coolcentric, and Force10 went the extra mile in building an innovative computing system that equals all of Discover’s previous resources but uses less than 40 percent of the space and only 45 percent of the electricity,” said Phil Webster, NCCS project manager and chief of the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “The expanded capabilities are supporting NASA contributions to international climate science programs as well as advancing the state-of-the-art in modeling and simulation.”

Used primarily for climate studies, Discover uses current-generation Intel Xeon 5600 “Westmere” (2.8 GHz) processor technology, 28.8 terabytes of memory, and a 40 gigabit-per-second InfiniBand network.