Dell servers will power NASA’s climate change investigations

Dell Computer Corp. has entered into a $5.1 million contract to provide new servers to NASA so the space agency can conduct simulation modeling and data analysis to explore, understand and predict climate change.

The NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., will receive Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers customized for high-performance computing environments, according to a Dell announcement today.

The new servers, introduced this past spring, will double the climate simulation center’s computational capabilities to more than 300 trillion calculations per second.

NASA researchers at Goddard and other NASA locations will benefit from significant improvements in the C6100’s performance and reduction in energy consumption over previous generations of servers.

The agency could expect improvements of 69 percent in performance and 47 percent in energy efficiency.

This increased performance will enable users to fine-tune global model resolutions to capture smaller-scale features in the atmosphere and oceans, the Dell statement said.

Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, ranks No. 11 on Washington Technology’s 2010 Top 100 list of the largest federal government prime contractors.