Sandia National Lab and the National Renewable Energy Lab have just unveiled a nice, new tool: a 180-teraflop supercomputer designed and built by the Sun/Oracle and Intel corporations. The specs for the computer, nicknamed Red Mesa, were developed jointly by SNL and NREL, although the computer is physically located at SNL.

Red Mesa is the newer, faster cousin of SNL’s 160 tera-flop Red Sky supercomputer installed last year. The two can work in tandem to produce a system whose top speed can reach a total speed of 500 teraflops.

From a DOE release on the computers:

The work for the first time brings defense-scale computing to bear on alternative energy projects that otherwise could take months or even years to complete if researchers had to rely on more limited computing resources or on physical testing.

Joe Polito, Sandia vice president of Enterprise Transformation, called Red Mesa “a state-of-the-art computing platform to address pressing energy problems for the country, using the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the country.”

Megan McCluer, DOE program manager for wind and hydropower technologies, said, “The Red Mesa platform will provide the speed and scale needed to perform large-scale computations targeted toward the continued improvements of clean energy technologies.”

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