Houston data center plugs in sustainable upgrades

hardware update

The hardware upgrades more than “double the effective horsepower of DUG’s Houston data center.” Photo via dug.com

An Australia-based company has launched a major upgrade of its Houston data center with sustainability in mind.

DUG Technology announced it's increased the company’s high performance computing (HPC) capabilities and also reinforced its commitment to sustainable innovative technology. The company announced its latest investment in 1500 new AMD EPYCTM Genoa servers, which has 192 cores and 1.5 terabytes of DDR5 memory each. Quebec-based IT solution company Hypertec provided the immersion-born hardware.

“DUG’s decision highlights the unmatched technological advancements and superior performance of Hypertec immersion-born products, which are setting a new benchmark in the industry,” Hypertec’s Patrick Scateni, vice president of global sales says in a news release.

Recently, DUG deployed 600 new Intel Xeon CPU Max Series machines, which are equipped with 128 cores and one terabyte of RAM. All of their existing servers had a RAM upgrade to 384 gigabytes. The hardware upgrades more than “double the effective horsepower of DUG’s Houston data center,” according to the company.

DUG initially started construction on Bubba in 2018, and chose Skybox Datacenters as the facility to put Bubba in after a global search. The supercomputer landing in Houston represented the largest data center transaction in the Houston area's history with Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio having previously overshadowed Houston as hotspots for data center activity in the state.

“Houston was a natural choice," DUG’s Managing Director Matthew Lamont previously told InnovationMap. “Given the low cost of power and the fact that Skybox had the available infrastructure ready to go."

DUG’s Houston facility was the DCD Awards winner of the 2019 Enterprise Data Centre Design Award. The upgrade of DUG’s Houston-based supercomputer Bubba was opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony by the Hon Stephen Dawson MLA, Minister for Emergency Services; Innovation and the Digital Economy; Science; Medical Research, during his “Western Australia: USA Connect” mission to the United States.

Also present for the announcement was Christopher Skeete, Minister for the Economy in the National Assembly of Québec. DUG joined the Western Australia (WA) trade delegation to Texas, led by Minister Dawson. The trade delegation looks to establish strategic connections through investment and trade with WA with a focus on the energy transition and green technology.

“It is very exciting to see our HPC capabilities scale in response to the increasing demand for our technology,” Lamont says in the release. “The new hardware was purchased after extensive testing and our partners were chosen based on the unparalleled performance of their solutions. The Intel machines are already turbocharging our new MP-FWI Imaging technology, which is having a transformative impact on the way we process seismic data.

"Delivering unsurpassed imaging with rapid turnaround for our clients, it is a complete replacement for the conventional processing and imaging workflow," he continued. "The new Hypertec-supplied AMD machines are needed to accelerate delivery of both current and imminent projects, and to support the unprecedented demand we continue to see moving forward.”

The three Houston innovators to know this week represent new, exciting things for the innovation ecosystem. Courtesy photos

3 Houston innovators to know this week

Who's who

The movers and shakers within the Houston innovation ecosystem come from all kinds of industries — from private equity to supercomputing. This week's innovators to know reflect that industry diversity and are bringing something new to the table.

Jon Nordby, managing director of Houston's MassChallenge Texas chapter

Jon Nordby, former exec at Houston Exponential, will lead the inaugural Houston MassChallenge cohort. Courtesy of MassChallenge

Jon Nordby, who recently served as Houston Exponential's director of strategy since its launch, was named as the managing director of MassChallenge Texas in Houston, a zero-equity startup accelerator.

"MassChallenge's not-for-profit, no equity model is uniquely suited to accelerate the development of Houston's innovation ecosystem and is the foundation early-stage startups need to get to the point of disruption or pivot as fast as possible," says Nordby in a release.

Before HX, Nordby served as vice president of talent and innovation at the Greater Houston Partnership, and was essential in creating the organization's Innovation Initiative. Click here to learn more about the appointment.

Matthew Lamont, managing director at DownUnder GeoSolutions

Matthew Lamont is managing director at DownUnder GeoSolutions which just opened its new, powerful data center west of Houston. Courtesy of DUG

Matthew Lamont isn't technically a Houstonian, but the managing director of Perth, Australia-based DownUnder GeoSolutions gets the honorary title for bringing one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, nicknamed Bubba, to the Houston area. In fact, perhaps Lamont accepts the recognition on behalf of Bubba, who — while inanimate — is definitely a Houstonian.

DUG is heavily investing in Houston, and Bubba is just the start. The company plans to start on a friend for Bubba later this year and bring an even more powerful supercomputer to the market by 2021. Read more about Lamont, Bubba, and all that DUG is doing in Houston here.

Taseer Badar, founder and CEO of ZT Corporate

Taseer Badar is in the business of making money. Courtesy of ZT Corporate

Taseer Badar will shoot it to you straight: Houston startups struggling to find capital might need to look nationally or globally.

"Investors in Houston want positive earnings before interest, tax, and amortization," he says. "But that doesn't mean it's not possible in New York, Dallas, Austin, or other cities. There are technology conferences everywhere, that's a great way to get known as a startup."

As CEO and founder of ZT Corporate with 1,000 investors to manage, he knows private equity, and what it takes to invest. Read more about Badar here.

Matthew Lamont is managing director at DownUnder GeoSolutions' which just opened its new, powerful data center west of Houston. Courtesy of DUG

Massive data center officially opens just west of Houston

Now online

DownUnder GeoSolutions has officially opened its new data centre in Skybox Houston in Katy, Texas. It's being billed as one of the most powerful supercomputers on earth.

The center, which houses DUG's geophysical cloud service, DUG McCloud, celebrated its grand opening on Thursday, May 16. The company's data hall has 15 megawatts of power and resides in a building designed to withstand hurricane-force winds up to 190 mph.

A second, identical hall is already planned to be built out later this year. Together, the two machines will have a capacity of 650 petaflop, which is a measurement of computing speed that's equal to one thousand million million floating-point operations per second.

In addition to the second hall, DUG is working to build another giant computing system with exaflop capacity — a billion billion calculations per second — by 2021.

"We are in a race to build the first exascale supercomputing system," says Phil Schwan, CTO for DUG, in a news release.

Australia-based DUG first started construction on Bubba, the nickname for the machine, last year and chose Skybox Datacenters as the facility to put Bubba in after a global search. The supercomputer landing in Houston represented the largest data center transaction in the Houston area's history. Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio have long overshadowed Houston as hotspots for data center activity in Texas.

An differentiating asset of Bubba is the cooling process, which reduces energy usage and costs. Thirteen miles of pipes connect the hard drives to 20-foot cooling towers. Bubba uses "its own patented immersion system that submerges the computer nodes in more than 700 specially-designed tanks filled with polyalphaolefin dielectric fluid," according to the release.

"The complete DUG Insight software suite is available, and is fully-optimised to run on the cloud," says DUG's managing director, Matthew Lamont.

DUG's device is based on Intel® Xeon® processors, and the company uses Intel's technology to enhance its services, and there are more than 40,000 Intel Xeon processor nodes within the DUG McCloud network.

"The close collaboration between our two companies ensures DUG customers have access to the compute resources needed to obtain more meaningful insights from the geophysical landscapes they are exploring," says Trish Damkroger, vice president and general manager of Intel's Extreme Computing Organization, in a release.

"The Bubba supercomputer is a tremendous addition to the DUG McCloud network, and we look forward to our continued collaboration to build even more powerful systems to help accelerate this research and development."

Super-sized supercomputer

Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

Bubba, as the machine is called, has 15 megawatts of power and resides in a building designed to withstand hurricane-force winds up to 190 mph.

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Houston robotics co. unveils new robot that can handle extreme temperatures

Hot New Robot

Houston- and Boston-based Square Robot Inc.'s newest tank inspection robot is commercially available and certified to operate at extreme temperatures.

The new robot, known as the SR-3HT, can operate from 14°F to 131°F, representing a broader temperature range than previous models in the company's portfolio. According to the company, its previous temperature range reached 32°F to 104°F.

The new robot has received the NEC/CEC Class I Division 2 (C1D2) certification from FM Approvals, allowing it to operate safely in hazardous locations and to perform on-stream inspections of aboveground storage tanks containing products stored at elevated temperatures.

“Our engineering team developed the SR-3HT in response to significant client demand in both the U.S. and international markets. We frequently encounter higher temperatures due to both elevated process temperatures and high ambient temperatures, especially in the hotter regions of the world, such as the Middle East," David Lamont, CEO of Square Robot, said in a news release. "The SR-3HT employs both active and passive cooling technology, greatly expanding our operating envelope. A great job done (again) by our engineers delivering world-leading technology in record time.”

The company's SR-3 submersible robot and Side Launcher received certifications earlier this year. They became commercially available in 2023, after completing initial milestone testing in partnership with ExxonMobil, according to Square Robot.

The company closed a $13 million series B round in December, which it said it would put toward international expansion in Europe and the Middle East.

Square Robot launched its Houston office in 2019. Its autonomous, submersible robots are used for storage tank inspections and eliminate the need for humans to enter dangerous and toxic environments.

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This article originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Houston's Ion District to expand with new research and tech space, The Arc

coming soon

Houston's Ion District is set to expand with the addition of a nearly 200,000-square-foot research and technology facility, The Arc at the Ion District.

Rice Real Estate Company and Lincoln Property Company are expected to break ground on the state-of-the-art facility in Q2 2026 with a completion target set for Q1 2028, according to a news release.

Rice University, the new facility's lead tenant, will occupy almost 30,000 square feet of office and lab space in The Arc, which will share a plaza with the Ion and is intended to "extend the district’s success as a hub for innovative ideas and collaboration." Rice research at The Arc will focus on energy, artificial intelligence, data science, robotics and computational engineering, according to the release.

“The Arc will offer Rice the opportunity to deepen its commitment to fostering world-changing innovation by bringing our leading minds and breakthrough discoveries into direct engagement with Houston’s thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Rice President Reginald DesRoches said in the release. “Working side by side with industry experts and actual end users at the Ion District uniquely positions our faculty and students to form partnerships and collaborations that might not be possible elsewhere.”

Developers of the project are targeting LEED Gold certification by incorporating smart building automation and energy-saving features into The Arc's design. Tenants will have the opportunity to lease flexible floor plans ranging from 28,000 to 31,000 square feet with 15-foot-high ceilings. The property will also feature a gym, an amenity lounge, conference and meeting spaces, outdoor plazas, underground parking and on-site retail and dining.

Preleasing has begun for organizations interested in joining Rice in the building.

“The Arc at the Ion District will be more than a building—it will be a catalyst for the partnerships, innovations and discoveries that will define Houston’s future in science and technology,” Ken Jett, president of Rice Real Estate Company, added in the release. “By expanding our urban innovation ecosystem, The Arc will attract leading organizations and talent to Houston, further strengthening our city’s position as a hub for scientific and entrepreneurial progress.”

Intel Corp. and Rice University sign research access agreement

innovation access

Rice University’s Office of Technology Transfer has signed a subscription agreement with California-based Intel Corp., giving the global company access to Rice’s research portfolio and the opportunity to license select patented innovations.

“By partnering with Intel, we are creating opportunities for our research to make a tangible impact in the technology sector,” Patricia Stepp, assistant vice president for technology transfer, said in a news release.

Intel will pay Rice an annual subscription fee to secure the option to evaluate specified Rice-patented technologies, according to the agreement. If Intel chooses to exercise its option rights, it can obtain a license for each selected technology at a fee.

Rice has been a hub for innovation and technology with initiatives like the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, an accelerator focused on expediting the translation of the university’s health and medical technology; RBL LLC, a biotech venture studio in the Texas Medical Center’s Helix Park dedicated to commercializing lifesaving medical technologies from the Launch Pad; and Rice Nexus, an AI-focused "innovation factory" at the Ion.

The university has also inked partnerships with other tech giants in recent months. Rice's OpenStax, a provider of affordable instructional technologies and one of the world’s largest publishers of open educational resources, partnered with Microsoft this summer. Google Public Sector has also teamed up with Rice to launch the Rice AI Venture Accelerator, or RAVA.

“This agreement exemplifies Rice University’s dedication to fostering innovation and accelerating the commercialization of groundbreaking research,” Stepp added in the news release.

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