SANTA
CLARA, Calif., Sept. 5, 2012 – Signaling its commitment to
energy-efficient high- performance computing, Intel Corporation today
announced that it will work with HP to help design and provide the U.S.
Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) with a
supercomputing system that will drive research across a number of
energy-related initiatives, including renewable energy and
energy-efficient technologies. The new High Performance Computer (HPC)
data center promises to become one of the world's most efficient
installations.
The
system is scheduled to deliver full compute capacity in the summer of
2013 and will feature approximately 3,200 Intel® Xeon® processors
including current-generation
Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2670, future 22nm Ivy Bridge based processors and approximately 600 new
Intel® Xeon Phi™
co-processors. The total peak performance of the system is expected to
exceed 1 Petaflop (equivalent to a thousand trillion floating point
operations per second) and it will be the largest supercomputer
dedicated solely to renewable energy and energy efficiency research.
Leading energy-efficient capabilities of Intel Xeon processors and
Intel® Xeon Phi™ co-processors combined with the new HP warm water
cooling solution and innovative data center design will result in this
facility likely being the world's most efficient data center with a
power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.06 or better.
"The
heart of NREL is based on a powerful combination of the Intel Xeon
processor E5 product family, which leads the data center industry in
performance per watt, and Intel Xeon Phi co-processors which are setting
new records for energy efficiency," said Raj Hazra, vice president and
general manager of Intel Technical Computing Group. "We are proud that
the very best energy-efficient processing technology in computing is the
foundation for the supercomputer that will drive the research for
renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies."
Data Center Nearly Twice as Efficient as Industry Average
The
data center industry uses the PUE rating as the standard measurement to
describe the power usage effectiveness and measure the efficiency of
any given site. The ideal PUE rating would be 1.0, and PUE of 2.0 means
that for every watt of power used for IT equipment, an additional watt
is used in overhead like cooling systems. According to the EPA's Energy
Star Program*, a typical PUE is 1.92. With a PUE rating for this system
expected to be 1.06 or better,NREL's installation will be nearly twice
efficient as average.
"At
NREL, we have taken a holistic approach to sustainable computing," said
Steve Hammond, NREL Computational Science director. "This new system
will allow NREL to increase our computational capabilities while being
mindful of energy and water used. We will take advantage of both the
bytes of information produced and the BTUs produced. The new HPC system
will dramatically improve our modeling and simulations capabilities used
to advance energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies as well
as energy system integration. At the same time, NREL's partnership with
Intel and HP will demonstrate best-in-class for energy-efficient
computing and data center design and will provide a laboratory for
collaborative research to address future energy challenges in HPC
systems and data centers."
Intel
and HP experts worked with data center designers at NREL to leverage
innovative warm water liquid cooling technology to maximize the reuse of
heat. There will not be any traditional mechanical or compressor-based
cooling systems; the "waste heat" from the computer system will be used
as the primary heat source in the adjacent office and lab space. Excess
heat can also be exported to other areas of the NREL campus. The data
center design is compact, resulting in short runs for both electrical
and plumbing components.
Intel Xeon Phi: A Key Ingredient
One
of the key ingredients in making this facility energy and performance
efficient was the inclusion of the upcoming Intel® Xeon Phi™
co-processors. Made using Intel's 22nm 3-D tri-Gate transistor
technology, the co-processors based on Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC)
architecture offer a combination of leading performance efficiency and
friendly programming model, allowing developers to achieve great
performance at low energy and time cost associated with optimizing
applications for taking full advantage of new technology. NREL was
participating in the software development for Intel MIC architecture,
and spent only a few days to port a half-million lines of code of the
Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) application to prepare for taking
full advantage of the energy efficiency and performance of Intel Xeon
Phi cores. WRF is one of several atmospheric modeling tools NREL is
deploying in wind energy research.
"The
idea is to make wind power compelling from a cost-of-energy
standpoint," said John Michalakes, NREL HPC scientist. "Modeling the
wind energy systemfrom meteorological to turbine scales means squeezing
every last ounce of performance from our simulations, and the ability to
develop and optimize using the same software ecosystem as the host
Intel Xeon processor is a tremendous boost for application performance,
scaling and programmer productivity."
Intel
is committed to driving energy efficiency in its products and
manufacturing operations. Intel's IT organization continues to improve
the energy efficiency of the company's data centers and completed
projects that have saved nearly 120 million kWh of energy over the past 2
years. Additionally, Intel has invested more than $58 million in
resource conservation and efficiency projects to reduce energy use in
operations, saving more than 825 million kWh of energy since 2001.
For more information click on intel logo 
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