HPE to Build Next-Generation Supercomputer for DOE National Laboratory

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that it has been selected to build a new supercomputer for the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

NREL is a national laboratory focused on solving challenges in energy efficiency and developing renewable energy technologies.

High-performance computers are a class of systems designed to allow researchers to tackle large-scale data problems. HPE said that supercomputers have had applications in fraud detection, medical record management, weather prediction and race car optimization.

NREL plans to use the new high-performance computer to support research and development in energy transformation as well as initiatives related to security, resilience, storage, systems integration, energy justice and community transitions, HPE said Wednesday.

The company said it will use its Cray EX exascale platform as the base of NREL’s Kestrel supercomputer, which will serve as the dedicated high-performance computing system for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

HPE said that Kestrel will offer approximately 44 petaflops of peak performance, more than five times greater than what is possible with NREL’s current Eagle computing system. The new system will be housed in NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility data center in Golden, Colorado.

DOE plans to use Kestrel for research in computational materials, continuum mechanics and large-scale simulation and planning for future energy systems, HPE added.

HPE said its system will feature Intel’s “Sapphire Rapids” generation of Xeon scalable processors, Nvidia’s A100NEXT Tensor Core graphics processing unit, a custom-built Ethernet cable and congestion control features for artificial intelligence and other data-intensive workloads.

Kestrel will include more than 75 PB of parallel file system storage with HPE’s Cray Clusterstor E1000 storage system.