Intel has teamed up with HP to provide the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) a supercomputer built on Intel’s latest Xeon E5-2670 processors, its yet-to-come Ivy Bridge processors and its Xeon Phi co-processors.

The new data center will be used to research renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies, among other energy-related initiatives, Intel said Wednesday.

Steve Hammond, director of computational science at NREL, said the lab had taken a holistic approach to sustainable computing.

“This new system will allow NREL to increase our computational capabilities while being mindful of energy and water used,” he said. “We will take advantage of both the bytes of information produced and the BTUs produced.”

Scheduled to deliver full capacity in the summer of 2013, the system will feature about 3,200 Xeon processors, 600 of which will be the Xeon Phi co-processors.

Intel announced Xeon Phi in June, saying it was its new brand for all future many-integrated-core (MIC) processors for high-performance computing systems. The architecture is codenamed as “Knights Corner.”

The data center that will house the future supercomputer at NREL will also be innovative in terms of energy efficiency. Intel and HP have been working with NREL data center designers to leverage warm-water cooling technology, so that the facility can reuse heat it generates.

The data center will not have any traditional mechanical or compressor-based cooling systems. The campus will reuse waste heat for comfort heating in adjacent offices and labs.