Industrial, Solar, Sourcing Renewables, Wind  -  December 3, 2021

Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Build Supercomputer for Renewable Power

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that it was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to build a new supercomputer to support ongoing R&D that will transform energy from geothermal, water, wind, solar, and fuels. 

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

NREL has named the new supercomputer Kestrel after the American falcon. HPE will build Kestrel using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, a high performance computing (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. 

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

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

Once completed in 2023, Kestrel will have more than five times 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, Colorado.

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