US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory Selects HPE Cray EX HPC

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP has been selected by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to build a HPC to support ongoing R&D that will transform energy from geothermal, water, wind, solar, and fuels.

The HPC will also support energy initiatives related to security, resilience, storage, systems integration, energy justice, and community transitions, as well as transportation and mobility, buildings, and advanced manufacturing.

In continuing its naming theme of HPCs that honors various bird species, such as with previous system generations named Peregrine and Eagle, NREL has named the new HPC Kestrel, after the American falcon.

HPE will build Kestrel using the Cray EX HPC, a next-gen HPC platform that provides end-to-end HPC solutions to scale performance and harness insights more efficiently through advanced modeling, simulation, AI and analytics capabilities.

As the dedicated HPC system for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Kestrel will play a critical role in computing across the research portfolio, advancing research in computational materials, continuum mechanics, and large-scale simulation and planning for future energy systems.

The Cray EX also features liquid-cooling capabilities that support NREL’s showcase facility for demonstrating data center efficiency, which has achieved an annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.036.

“HPE has a long-standing collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) where we have developed joint HPC and AI solutions to innovate new approaches that reduce energy consumption and lower operating costs,” said Bill Mannel, VP and GM, HPC, HPE. “We look forward to continuing our relationship with NREL and are honored to have been selected to deliver an advanced HPC with Kestrel that will augment the laboratory’s efforts in making breakthrough discoveries of new, affordable energy sources to prepare for a sustainable future.“

For a boost in computing capacity, HPE will feature next gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids), NVIDIA A100NEXT Tensor Core GPUs to accelerate AI, and HPE Slingshot, an Ethernet fabric purposely built for next-gen supercomputing to address higher speed and congestion control for larger data-intensive and AI workloads. Additionally, NREL’s Kestrel will deliver more than 75PB of parallel file system storage using the Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system for expanded storage and intelligent tiering capabilities to tackle complex, data-intensive workflows.

“NREL is excited to officially announce the procurement of our new HPC,” said Kris Munch, lab program manager of advanced computing, NREL. “Kestrel will help EERE researchers and industry partners tackle today’s toughest energy challenges and bring the United States one step closer to a clean energy future.“

Once completed in 2023, Kestrel will have more than 5x greater performance than NREL‘s existing system, Eagle, with approximately 44 petaflops of peak performance. It will be hosted in NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) data center in Golden, CO.

HPE and NREL Continue HPC and AI Collaboration to Drive Innovation for Cleaner Energy
In addition to co-designing the last three HPCs for NREL, HPE and NREL have collaborated on other projects that use HPC and AI in ways to build technologies for energy efficiency. These include an AIO/s R&D project that involves developing AI and ML technologies to monitor, automate and improve operational efficiency, including resiliency and energy usage, in data centers, and an initiative to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell-powered data centers to deliver smarter, more energy-conscious computing environments.

More about NREL’s Kestrel system