Australian energy company to build world’s fastest supercomputer in Katy

By: Paul Takahashi - Houston Chronicle
DownUnder GeoSolutions, an Australian oil and gas exploration company, plans to build the world's fastest supercomputer in Katy.

The company announced Thursday it is under construction on the new supercomputer facility at Skybox Datacenters' Houston campus, located at 22000 Franz Road near the Energy Corridor. Once finished by February, the facility will house more than 40,000 servers with more than 250 petaflops of computing speed. A computer with one petaflop of computing speed can execute one thousand trillion operations per second.

"Houston was a natural choice given the low cost of power and the fact that Skybox had the available infrastructure ready to go," Matthew Lamont, co-founder of DownUnder Geosolutions, said in a statement.

DownUnder GeoSolutions is a global geosciences company that provides computational modelling services to energy companies looking for new oil and gas extraction sites.

The company's new Katy facility will draw 15 megawatts of power, enough to power 3,000 Texas homes on a hot summer day. To keep them cool, the servers will be submerged in a tank full of a special fluid, rather than cooled by refrigeration or fans. This will reduce the data center's energy use by 45 percent over traditional air-cooled systems, according to DownUnder Geosolutions.

Bennett Data Center Solutions, a Houston-based data center consultant, represented DownUnder Geosolutions in its deal with Dallas-based SkyBox.

SkyBox's 20-acre Houston campus features a LEED Gold-certified data center with a six-inch thick concrete roof that can sustain hurricane-force winds of up to 190 miles per hour. The data center supports Fortune 500 companies as well as small- and medium-sized companies.

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