Nvidia is celebrating after Italy’s “Eurora” supercomputer, which uses Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators based on Nvidia Kepler, set a new record for data centre energy efficiency.

Eurora was built by Eurotech at the Cineca facility in Bologna, Italy.  It is the country’s most powerful supercomputing centre and has reached 3,150 megaflops per watt of sustained performance which is 26 per cent higher than the top system on the most recent Green500 list of the world’s most efficient supercomputers. According to an Nvidia spokesman Eurora achieved the record-breaking achievement by combining 128 high-performance, energy-efficient NVIDIA Tesla K20 accelerators with the Eurotech Aurora Tigon supercomputer.

This features Aurora Hot Water Cooling technology, which uses direct hot water cooling on all electronic and electrical components of the HPC system. Eurora is being used by boffins for research and discovery across a range of scientific disciplines, including material science, astrophysics, life sciences and Earth sciences.

Sanzio Bassini, director of HPC department at Cineca said that the advanced computer simulations that enable scientists to discover new phenomena and test hypotheses require massive amounts of performance, which can consume a lot of power.

“Equipped with the ultra-efficient Aurora system and Nvidia GPU accelerators, Eurora will give European researchers the computing muscle to study all types of physical and biological systems, while allowing us to keep data center power consumption and costs in check,” Bassini said.

Pairing Nvidia Tesla K20 GPUs with Eurotech’s Aurora Hot Water Cooling technology, the Eurora system is more efficient and compact than conventional air-cooled solutions. Eurora is a prototype system developed for Cineca under the PRACE 2IP initiative to provide a sustainable, high-quality infrastructure to meet the most demanding needs of the European HPC user community.