URS Energy and Construction Taps SGI for HPC

Silicon Graphics International Corporation announced
that URS Energy and Construction, Inc., a division of URS Corporation has partnered with Silicon Graphics International Corporation to
design, build and deploy an energy efficient SGI ICE Cube Air modular data
center-based HPC system to support the US Department of Energy (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory
(NETL) carbon capture and storage initiative and its electrical grid Upgrade
programs which enable the transition to electric cars.

The system installation and testing is currently underway in Morgantown, West
Virginia.

"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, under both normal and extreme operational loads via sustained
Linpack testing, the SGI HPC system is housed in 40 racks and includes 378 SGI
Rackable servers. It features 24,192 Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors providing
peak performance of over 500 teraflops, possibly ranking as the 44th most
powerful HPC systems in the world based on the June 2012 Top500 list.

The system includes 72TB of system memory and 9PB of total storage, all
housed in an Eco-logical SGI ICE Cube Air modular data center. The system is
connected via a non-blocking IB fabric based on
Mellanox ConnectX adapters and IS5600 enterprise-class 648-port switches. As
part of this agreement, SGI Professional Services provides project management,
installation support and training of URS and DOE staff involved in the project.

"SGI is honored to provide the DOE
NETL with a complete HPC solution to accelerate the discovery of how to get
cleaner and more efficient energy production to meet the current and future
demands," said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO of SGI. "To support these initiatives with a data
center operating at industry-leading PUE means that the DOE leads by example."

With the deployment of green technologies and the pursuit of energy efficiency
at the heart of the DOE NETL mission, the SGI ICE Cube Air modular data center
(MDC) was chosen by URS to achieve the maximum energy efficiency possible for
the HPC system deployment.

The ICE Cube Air expandable line of modular data centers offer
cost and energy efficient solutions for the ever-expanding need for more data
center space. As an alternative to brick-and-mortar or co-location sites,
ICE Cube Air is ideal for supplementing or replacing traditional data center
facilities. Efficient fans, along with a four-stage
evaporative cooling system, allow the ICE Cube Air to run with outside air
and evaporative cooling in most climates, achieving a PUE ratio of 1.06 or
less.

Supplemental direct expansion (DX), or chilled-water cooling coils, provide an
optional backup cooling system for customers deploying in extreme temperature
and humidity environments. Optional heaters are available to enable operation
in extreme cold climates. ICE Cube Air uses 1% of the water needed by
standard water-chilled containers, and requires only standard potable water
from a garden hose.

In addition to research conducted onsite, NETL’s project portfolio
includes R&D conducted through partnerships, cooperative research and
development agreements, financial assistance, and contractual arrangements with
universities and the private sector. Together, these efforts focus a wealth of
scientific and engineering talent on creating commercially viable solutions to
national energy and environmental problems.

"This significant energy project at
NETL represents exactly the type of challenging environment that many of our
customers find themselves in – the need for the highest performance with little
or no impact on energy consumption," said Eyal Waldman, chairman,
president and CEO of Mellanox. "The combination of Mellanox’s leading IB interconnects and SGI’s cost
and energy efficient modular data center solutions provides end-users such as
NETL with superior compute and storage performance and efficiency."