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Sun Solaris Computer Grid Powers Next Generation Nuclear Reactor Design from the Department of Energy

Bill Magwood, DOE NE Director

The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and Sun Microsystems, Inc., today announced the development of a high-performance computer cluster at the U.S. Department of Energy’s laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

The solution includes more than 230 Sun Solaris Servers powered by AMD Opteron processors; and, more than 12 Terabytes of Sun StorEdge 6320 storage, the Solaris 9 operating system, Java Enterprise System and Java development software, Sun’s StarOffice 7.0 office productivity platform, as well as advanced on-site training and support from Sun’s Services division. The cluster’s full-throttle computing power ranks the INEEL datacenter as one of the world’s top 150 supercomputing sites.

“This agreement will provide INEEL with the high performance computing capability it will need to be at the forefront of science research and advanced technology development,” said Bill Magwood, the Department of Energy’s Director of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology. “Sun’s grid computing cluster will provide our scientists with the ability to complete 2 trillion floating-point operations in one second. These are the kind of computing resources they need to develop the energy sources for the future.”

Sun’s Solaris-based grid computing cluster solution dramatically advances the compute power for Idaho’s national laboratory and will enable INEEL professionals to directly support the engineering resources needed on a very large scale for the design of the Department of Energy’s Generation IV nuclear reactors. This capability is essential in the demanding collaboration environment required among the eleven partners contributing to Generation IV design efforts.

Paul Kearns, INEEL Lab Director

INEEL Laboratory Director Paul Kearns said, “This computer enhancement is part of our longer-term plan of increasing the Laboratory’s computer capabilities to support the collaboration with our Generation IV partners. We are combining this lease with $543,000 of funding from Bechtel’s Corporate Funded Research and Development program to develop a collaborative engineering and research model as a key part of the Generation IV research. It also will support research and development efforts in all areas of our multi-program national laboratory, including energy, national security, environment and other key technologies.”

“The days of expensive mainframes spread across acres of facilities are behind us, as leading labs like INEEL show the way to supercomputing prowess built on ready-to-deploy, low-cost Solaris systems from Sun,” said Clark Masters, Executive Vice President, Global Government Office, Sun Microsystems. “Sun’s leadership in high performance computing is rooted in a long history of innovative designs and technologies aimed squarely as this market. Our military-grade Solaris operating system running on industry standard platforms, combined with Sun’s market-leading grid computing management tools, provide an open, unbeatable platform for price and flexibility.”

The Solairs-based grid computing cluster solution was financed through the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule that allows government customers such as the DOE and INEEL to finance Sun solutions with a convenient monthly payment plan that requires no negotiation. The total value of the INEEL solution is $1.97 million over 3-years.

The Generation IV nuclear energy systems initiative was started by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology which engaged governments, industry, and the research community worldwide to develop next-generation nuclear energy. The Generation-IV International Forum (GIF) is a group whose members are — Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Euratom, France, Japan, Republic of South Africa, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States — are interested in jointly defining the future of nuclear energy research and development.