500 Teraflop SGI Super at DOE to Pave the Grid for Electric Cars

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This week SGI announced a partnership with URS Energy and Construction to deploy a modular datacenter for the DOE National Energy Technology Laboratory. The system will be used for the Carbon Capture & Storage Initiative and its Electrical Grid Upgrade Programs to enable the transition to electric cars.

To meet our charter of both leading and supporting energy options to fuel our national economy, as well as strengthening our national security and improving our environment, URS is pleased to work with SGI in the fabrication and deployment of this powerful, expandable and energy efficient modular data center,” said Dave Speed, operations manager, URS. “At 500 teraflops, this SGI system ranks among the top HPC systems in the world. The system will be used by NETL to drive accelerated development of cleaner and more efficient methods of coal-based electricity production using computer-aided engineering and simulation, which allows us to skip building several generations of physical prototypes. This saves immense time and costs.”

Delivering an average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.03 since installation, the SGI HPC system is housed in 40 racks and includes 378 SGI Rackable servers with 24,192 Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors providing peak performance of over 500 teraflops. The system includes 72 terabytes of system memory and nine petabytes of total storage, all housed in an Eco-logical SGI ICE Cube Air modular data center. The system is connected via a high performance non-blocking InfiniBand fabric based on Mellanox ConnectX adapters and IS5600 enterprise-class 648-port switches. Read the Full Story.