Dell, NASA Deal Helps Climate Change Research

Dell has inked a $5.1 million deal with NASA to provide the space agency with PowerEdge C6100 servers to revamp one of its high-performance computer facilities, which is dedicated to examining the impact of climate change on the planet.

The July 15 deal calls for Dell to provide the NASA Center for Climate Simulation,  which is located at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., with PowerEdge C6100 servers for its HPC infrastructure.

When the upgrade is complete, the NCCS center's HPC capacity will double to 300 teraflops, or 300 trillion calculations per second. This upgrade will allow the NCSS to create better computer models of how climate change is affecting the planet, and will help in researching the impact climate change has on the oceans and the atmosphere.

The NCCS is one of NASA's new facilities and was introduced by NASA June 28. The facility already contains a supercomputer called Discover, which operates at a capacity of 160 teraflops. However, the facility is looking to add to its overall HPC capacity.

"When we debuted the NASA Center for Climate Simulation this spring, we anticipated expanding our high-performance computing capabilities to meet the growing needs of NASA's earth and space science user community," Phil Webster, the chief of Goddard's Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office, said in a statement.

In addition to HPC facilities such as the NCCS, Dell's PowerEdge C6100 servers target cloud computing platforms and Web 2.0 applications. The systems can support up to four nodes independently, and each node supports two Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 processors.