The lab's industry partners also see a long-term relationship for energy efficiency and HPC, especially when it comes to exascale computing.
"We see the area of HPC as being insatiable; people will have a need for ever-greater performance," Wheat said. "One of the things we are mindful of is that while our systems are becoming denser in terms of footprint, they are becoming more power efficient. NREL is the premiere place to demonstrate a means to continue the growth of HPC capability in an environmentally friendly way."
HP's Turkel echoes that sentiment: "As power-efficient and dense as our HPC systems are, to meet our customer's rapidly expanding requirements for performance, we would need to grow even our most powerful and efficient system to be impractically large and complex, while consuming enormous amounts of energy.
"To get to the levels of scale that our customers are demanding of us, we have to fundamentally change the dynamic around power, density, and performance," Turkel added. "We have to be able to do it in a much smaller package using less energy. This project is a step in that direction and it's apropos that NREL is a partner in the effort."
"eBay, Facebook, and others have data centers that are water capable, but there aren't any products on the market now that are providing liquid cooling," Hammond said. "NREL is getting the first product that is direct-component liquid cooled. We're going to show it's possible, efficient, safe, and reliable."
Expanding NREL's View into the Unseen
The $10 million HPC system will support the breadth of research at NREL, leading to increased efficiency and lower costs for research on clean energy technologies including solar photovoltaics, wind energy, electric vehicles, buildings technologies, and renewable fuels.
The new system is crucial to advanci
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| Contact: David Glickson david.glickson@nrel.gov 303-275-4097 DOE/National Renewable Energy Laboratory Source:Eurekalert |