The US National energy technology lab has commissioned a half petaflop supercomputer from SGI to support its carbon capture and storage initiative. The system is being installed by URS Energy and Construction. The machine, an SGI ‘ICE Cube Air’ comprises 378 SGI Rackable servers with a total of 24,192 Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, 72 terabytes of RAM 9 petabytes storage. As befits a compute behemoth addressing ‘green’ issues, energy use is a priority.
An ‘Eco-logical’ system of fans and four-stage cooling system achieves a power usage effectiveness of under 1.06. Interconnect is provided by Mellanox’ ConnectX infiniband adapters and IS5600 648-port switches. SGI’s professional services unit is to provide project management, installation support and training to URS and DOE staff. In a previous existence, URS E&C, as Washington Construction, built the US’ Minuteman missile silos and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. More from NETL.
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