ComputerWorld has an article about Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, and he is excited about the energy savings in the data center.

Also, I've been close to a lot of people who worked in data centers - good friends -- and it's just like data centers always have huge racks and racks of equipment. And, almost every entity in the world is basing its operations on servers and disk storage, so it's almost unlimited. So [with Fusion-io] you're not confined to one little niche.

Now you may think what does Woz know about storage? Being ex-Apple I knew this part.

You've never really been a storage guy. What attracted you to this technology? Well, I was a storage guy really early - in floppy disks. I don't come from the heavy-duty storage area where you've got RAID arrays and fiber optic channels. But, actually, the way I approached even designing my floppy disk structures was to take out a lot of middle man technology that wasn't needed - to look at the overall problem and get from the start to the finish in one quick jump. And, I saw those same principles had been applied in designing [Fusion-io's] product.

The solution is not a SSD, but a PCIe card.

Computerworld - Earlier this year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniakaccepted the position of chief scientist at start-up solid state drive company Fusion-io. It's the first time since 1972, when he worked in Hewlett-Packard Co's calculator division, that he's held a technologist's position for a company that wasn't his own.

Unlike many other solid state vendors, Fusion-io doesn't manufacture a NAND flash drive product in a 2.5-in. or 3.5-in hard drive form factor. The company makes PCIe cards with up to 640GB of capacity and 1.6GB/sec. throughput that can be inserted directly into servers, greatly increasing performance for I/O-intensive applications while also shrinking space requirements when compared to high-end hard disk drives.

Fusion-iO has a press release regarding their deployment at MySpace data center.

MySpace Uses Fusion-Powered I/O to Drive Greener Datacenters
Technology from Fusion-io Enables MySpace to Significantly Reduce Carbon Footprint, Saving Power, Cooling and Maintenance Costs
SALT LAKE CITY and LOS ANGELES – October 13, 2009 – Fusion-io today announced that it is working closely with MySpace to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint and costs associated with MySpace's datacenter operations. Using innovative solid-state storage solutions from Fusion-io, MySpace successfully deployed Fusion-io's technology to optimize their capital equipment and reduce the floor space and power consumed by their datacenter operations – significantly minimizing MySpace's environmental impact.
The revolutionary new deployment by MySpace offers another example of how solid-state storage technologies from Fusion-io give today's brightest engineering teams the power to rethink their datacenters and achieve dramatically lowered capital and operational costs by optimizing existing infrastructure for increased ease of management while greening the datacenter.

The case study PDF has more details.

The Results
Implementing Fusion-io gave MySpace the following benefits:
• Provided much higher performance, improving the user experience
• Cut hardware needs by 60%
• Significantly reduced its carbon footprint by lowering power and cooling requirements
• Recovered 280U of rack space
• Improved its data center’s reliability with non-volatile, 11-bit error correcting memory, and elimination of 2300 failure points
• Paid a much lower upfront price than for competitive solutions
Shawn plans to replace all of the remaining 1770 2U servers with Fusion-io enabled servers as they reach their end-of-life. This will allow MySpace to recover at least 1770U of rack space in the future, eliminate at least 18,000 failure points in their system, and save millions of dollars in power and cooling costs, showing
the world that you can make the smart business buy a green one too.

To research energy and climate change requires some of the faster computers.  News.com covers the release of a chip expected to be 10 times more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputer.

Supercomputer to use new Nvidia 'Fermi' chip

by Brooke Crothers

Updated at 6:40 p.m. PDT: adding additional information about Fermi chip .

Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced plans today for a new supercomputer that will use Nvidia's next-generation GPU architecture, codenamed "Fermi."

The Oak Ridge and Fermi announcements were made at Nvidia's GPU Technology developer's conference, which kicked off Wednesday in San Jose, Calif. The Fermi chip integrates three billion transistors, about three times the number of transistors in Nvidia's most powerful graphics chip now on the market. In the future, the chip will also find its way into Nvidia's GeForce product line for PCs.

Oak Ridge's supercomputer will be used for research in energy and climate change and is expected to be 10 times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputer, according to a joint statement from Oak Ridge and Nvidia. The architecture would use both graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvida and central processing units (CPUs), according to Nvidia. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, among others, make the CPUs.

High-end GPUs today typically contain hundreds of processing cores, allowing them to accelerate certain types of computational tasks much more efficiently, and thereby much faster, than CPUs. The new Fermi chip will have a little more than twice as many cores as current high-end Nvidia GPUs, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, jumping from 240 cores to 512 in Fermi.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang shows graphics card with new Fermi chip Wednesday

(Credit: Nvidia)

Fermi GPUs would enable "substantial scientific breakthroughs" that would be impossible without the new technology, said Jeff Nichols, Oak Ridge's associate lab director for Computing and Computational Sciences, in a statement.

"With the help of Nvidia technology, Oak Ridge proposes to create a computing platform that will deliver exascale computing within ten years," Nichols said. Exascale computing proposes to go beyond petaflop performance (a thousand trillion) to one million trillion calculations per second.

If you don’t have the budget of Oak Ridge National labs you can try Supermicro’s GPU solutions that I would expect to support the fermi chip.

Supermicro GPU-Optimized Supercomputing Server Solutions

The SS6016GT GPU Supercomputing Servers establish Supermicro as the true global IT hardware leader in server architecture, performance, and Green computing. Generating massively parallel processing power and unrivaled networking flexibility with two double-width GPUs or up to 5 expansion slots in a 1U form factor, the SS6016GT is performance and quality optimized for the most computationally-intensive applications. Supermicro's unique server designs with Gold Level power supplies, energy-saving motherboards and enterprise class server management optimize cooling for even the most demanding applications, providing the perfect technology platform for these impressive GPU Supercomputing Servers.
With performance bettering a small computer cluster while packing the punch (2-4 Teraflops) in a 1U, and 4U form factor, these GPU optimized solutions are ideal for Scientific computing, EDA, oil & gas exploration, military, science, and other computational intensive applications.

Medical
Imaging
Oil & Gas Exploration
Quantum
Chemistry
Financial
Simulation
3-D Rendering
& Gaming
Astrophysics

[ Press Release / Flyer 1 / Flyer 2 / In Design / White Paper]

GPU-Integrated 1U SuperServers (Graphics cards are included)

6016GT-TF-TM2
• Dual Quad/Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processors 5500 series
• Intel® 5520 chipset with QPI up to 6.4GT/s
• Up to 96GB of Reg. ECC DDR3 DIMM 1333/1066/800 MHz SDRAM
• 2x NVIDIA Tesla M1060 GPU Cards
   PCI-E 2.0 x4 (in x16 slot - Low-Profile)
• 3x hot-swap 3.5" drive bays
• Matrox G200eW graphics controller
• 8x counter-rotating fans with optimal fan speed control
• IPMI 2.0 with virtual media over LAN and KVM-ove-LAN
• Dual LAN with Intel 82576 Gigabit Ethernet controller
• 1400W high-efficiency Gold Level (93%) Power Supply with PMbus