Dave Vellante and John Furrier interviewed Gerald Kleyn, Program Director, Hyperscale Engineering, about how HP’s Lab Discovery assists customers when it comes to partner’s new solutions and chips. He’s speaking after the press gathering involving HP’s Project Moonshot. The initiative involves low-power chips that will bring server-scale and enterprise chips not only into the cloud, but add responsible green engineering that will lower costs and energy consumption.

“What we’ve been doing with a lot of our Hyperscale customers since we’ve had that unit, is bring in some of our top customers and have them run unit tests against our servers,” Kleyn said. They then use that to tweak and prepare servers for future expectations. He’s hoping to open up the Discovery Labs for customers to come in and try different architectures, specially the low-power chips.

He says that they’ve been tuning traditional products for large scale customers already; and for projects like Redstone they’ve been coupling partners and the Pathfinder program to help tune and prepare the next solution set. It’s not about just throwing code out there, but bringing both customers and partners into the game and get the R&D into the field so that customers can understand how the product works.

Furrier asked about how customers get in on the Discovery Lab techniques. Customers can get into the lab by invitation through the marketing department.

The first Discovery Lab will be open in January in Houston; later in the year Kleyn expects it to expand worldwide.

“We have a very open environment that they can come in and register some time,” he says. “They can run their workloads, look at the power usage…”

He explains that it’s all about power. How variation in power will really drive this industry. That customers want to see how the results will affect their solutions in a real-world problem, not just on a single sever, or a small set; but they want to see an entire rack in operation with the solution running on it. The Discovery Lab will make this available for customer workloads and allow them to type of what kind of power solutions and infrastructure they need using the new HP low-power chips.

He says that especially with Redstone they’ve been seeing a demonstrably lowered power bill and a lot of good things coming out of their labs which is why they are so looking forward to opening it up to customers.

Over the next year, Kleyn expects to import further products into the lab and expand with even more partners. There may only be one program and lab to start, but slowly they’ll be building them out across the world as they expand.