Army to replace batteries in 150,000 Dell laptop PCs

CPSC Dell Battery Recall Notice

The Army’s main enterprise information technology organization said it will have to replace batteries in 150,000 Dell laptop computers because of a voluntary recall the company and the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Aug. 14.

Kevin Carroll, the Army’s Program Executive Officer-Enterprise Information Systems, said Dell is already identifying first priority replacements to ensure that deployed soldiers get replacements as quickly as possible.

“Speedy supply-chain support in resolving this matter is our number one priority,” Carroll said.

Users with bad Dell batteries may have to wait three weeks for replacements, an EDS spokesman said Aug. 15. EDS, which runs the Navy Marine Corps Intranet contracts, has identified 45,000 NMCI end-users who will need to replace their batteries, the EDS spokesman said.

Dell, meanwhile, issued a press release stating that the Maui High Performance Computing Center, an Air Force research laboratory that the University of Hawaii manages, will install a 5,120-processor high-performance computing cluster using Dell servers. This acquisition would be the largest in the center’s history and its first significant purchase from Dell, according to the statement. The news was originally announced Aug. 8.

The new Dell PowerEdge cluster will increase the computational capability of the center’s high-performance computing platform to more than 60 teraflops/sec, the release states.

The Dell cluster uses 3.0 GHz Dual-Core Intel Woodcrest processors arranged in 1,280 four-core nodes using an InfiniBand interconnect, the center said.

The cluster purchase includes an optional upgrade scheduled in 2008, which would introduce Intel's most current multicore processor technology, the center said.