The solution includes more than 230 Sun Fire V20z servers powered by AMD Opteron processors, and more than 12 Terabytes of Sun StorEdge 6320 storage, the Solaris 9 Operating System, Sun Java Enterprise System and Java development software, Sun Grid Engine Enterprise Edition, 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 vault INEEL into a position among the world's top high performance computing sites and offers the ability to complete two trillion floating-point operations in a one-second heartbeat," said Bill Magwood, Director of Nuclear Energy, Department of Energy.

"Sun's grid computing cluster will provide our professionals the computing resources they need for next-generation nuclear reactor design."

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 11 partners contributing to Generation IV design efforts.

"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, industry-standard Sun Fire servers running the Solaris OS," 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."

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 Solaris-based grid computing cluster solution was financed through the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule provided through Sun Microsystems Finance.

The GSA 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 US Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology which engaged governments, industry, and research communities worldwide to develop the Generation IV International Forum (GIF).

A group whose member countries include: 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.

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