The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and processor maker Tensilica have teamed up to bring efficiency to energy intensive computing such as climate change modeling.

The lab and Tensilica have signed a collaboration agreement to work on new supercomputer designs using low-power embedded microprocessors. The effort is aimed at building cost-effective machines that can produce high quality climate models.

The proposed supercomputer design would use a large amount of embedded microprocessors like those found in cell phones, iPods and other electronics to make a machine 1,000 times more powerful than today's supercomputers.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists are looking to make highly detailed, 1 kilometer scale cloud models to improve climate predictions. Using current supercomputer designs of combining microprocessors used in personal computers, a system capable of making such models would cost about $1 billion and use up 200 megawatts of energy. A supercomputer using 20 million embedded processors, on the other hand, would cost about $75 million and use less than 4 megawatts of energy, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers.

“Hardware-software co-design using tiny processor cores such as those made by Tensilica holds great promise for systems that reduce power costs and increase practical system scale," said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director of computing sciences for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Such processors, by their nature, must deliver maximum performance while consuming minimal power - exactly the challenge facing the high performance computing community. One of the most compute-intensive applications is modeling global climate change, a critical research application and the perfect pilot application for energy-efficient computing optimization.”