"This supercomputer will aid in furthering EMSL's mission to use scientific computing to develop a molecular-level understanding of the physical, chemical and biological processes that underlie the most critical environmental issues facing the DOE", stated Kevin Regimbal, associate director for Enabling Technologies at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL).

The supercomputer will be located in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a Department of Energy (DOE) national scientific user facility located at the PNNL in Richland, Washington. It will be used for research projects related to bioremediation, energy production and environmental clean-up. The system's scalable design uses Voltaire InfiniBand-based switches as the high-performance interconnect to allow scientists to run more complex problems and obtain faster and more accurate results.

The supercomputer is composed of HP ProLiant servers interconnected with sixteen Voltaire Grid Director 2012 InfiniBand switches, which deliver 20 Gigabits/second or Double Data Rate (DDR) bandwidth and very low latency. Consisting of 18,480 2.2 gigahertz AMD processor cores, the supercomputer will have an expected total peak performance of about 163 teraflops, making it one of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

"We are delighted to work with PNNL to help them improve and expedite their research in environmental sciences", stated Peter Waxman, vice president of sales, Americas at Voltaire. "Voltaire's 20 Gigabits/second InfiniBand switches bring heightened levels of bandwidth and performance to PNNL's system enabling them to run more complex calculations faster and with greater efficiency."

"HP has a strong and successful relationship with Voltaire to deliver Voltaire's InfiniBand-based switches and software within HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio", stated Ed Turkel, manager of the product and technology marketing group for the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Division at HP. "Voltaire's solutions have enabled HP to deploy scalable, reliable, InfiniBand clusters across a broad performance range, including a number of very large systems such as this deployment at PNNL."