URS Taps SGI(R) For 500 Teraflop Supercomputer For DOE National Energy Technology Lab

FREMONT, Calif., Sept. 25, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SGI (Nasdaq:SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that URS Energy and Construction, Inc., a division of URS Corporation (NYSE:URS) has partnered with SGI to design, build and deploy an energy efficient SGI® ICE Cube® Air modular data center-based high performance computing (HPC) system to support the United States Department of Energy (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory's (NETL) Carbon Capture & 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 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. 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."

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