The Ripple Effect: How HPE Technology Helps Customers to Create a Better World

HPE Discover London is a high-voltage experience—anyone who attends can’t help but come away energized and excited about the future.

Here’s one reason why. As I listened to HPE visionaries talk about the future of business and witnessed the new innovations we are bringing to market, it is abundantly clear that sustainability is the common thread that runs through everything we do. Whether it’s the way we innovate our products, select our materials, manage our supply chain or run our operations, we knit sustainability into our business strategy. By doing so we create value for our company and our customers, all while creating a better world.

Of course this is tremendously important. But as I talk to customers something else is apparent and enormously exciting. A ripple effect occurs when our customers use our technology. There are many cases where our technology is used in a way that amplifies the positive impact to society. We’re the silent enabler of a better world.

Here’s just one example. HPE has worked with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and other partners to create Hikari, the world’s first solar powered supercomputer. TACC’s mission is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies.

Hikari, an HPE Apollo 8000 system, is a proof of concept—a first early demonstration of what the data center of the future, one that is fully high voltage DC enabled, could look like. Because we are transmitting directly from the high voltage DC source with the solar array to the high voltage DC computer, it eliminates the inversion,  basically running on free energy, in the most efficient and sustainable way. The real-time energy performance of this system outperforms any other platform on the planet.

As Nic Dube, Chief Technologist for High-Performance Computing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise says, “Some people say Hikari is the Ferrari of supercomputers. But a much better analogy is to call it the Tesla of supercomputers! Hikari will be the ‘greenest’ of the TACC systems.”

And the ripple effects go on and on! One of TACC’s missions is to enable ground-breaking research and Hikari is helping to do just that. It is currently being used to support Zika research, and will be used by the University of Texas medical researchers to make progress on diseases like cancer and disorders like autism.

This is a tremendous example of how, by making sustainability a driver of innovation, we are helping to ensure business and society can thrive without diminishing the Earth’s vital resources.

I can’t think of a more wonderful takeaway with which to leave Discover.