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HPE Triples Performance, Enhances Energy Efficiency in New Supercomputer for National Renewable Energy Lab

Published 6 years ago | About a 3 minute read

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced today it is building a new supercomputer for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) that is more energy efficient and 3.5 times more powerful than its existing system.¹ The new development is part of a long-standing collaboration between HPE and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to apply advanced supercomputing and HPC solutions to accelerate research across various DOE agencies. The new, fast-performing system, which NREL has named Eagle, will run more detailed models that simulate complex processes, systems, and phenomena to advance early research and development on energy technologies across fields including vehicle, wind power, and data sciences.

As computing advances and supercomputers increasingly adopt scalable performance, the industry will continue to combat energy consumption to lower operating costs and pollution levels. HPE is committed to designing innovative energy-efficient solutions for next-generation high performance computing technologies. Through collaborative efforts with NREL, from an initiative to enable data centers with hydrogen fuel cell to the new Eagle system, HPE is powering smarter, energy-conscious data center environments.

With Eagle, the world’s largest HPC system dedicated to advancing renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies¹, HPE is supporting NREL’s ongoing mission to significantly improve energy consumption and widen its sustainability practices. Eagle is powered by the HPE SGI 8600, a system designed from the ground up to run complex HPC workloads at petaflop speeds – or a quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Additionally, with the HPE SGI 8600, Eagle is gaining a warm liquid cooling system that captures 97 percent of wasted heat to reuse² in other areas of its hosted facility like surrounding office space and labs.

“We are strongly committed to architecting technologies that power the next wave of supercomputing and are creating advanced HPC systems while scaling energy efficiency in data centers, to get us there,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI Group, HPE. “Through Eagle and our overall ongoing collaboration with the U.S. DOE and NREL, we are advancing research to bolster innovation in energy and sustainability.”

HPE is enabling Eagle with a fully integrated, turn-key system that includes advanced next-generation compute, network and storage capabilities. The system runs on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, uses Mellanox EDR InfiniBand fabric and comprises a total of 76,104 compute cores, 2,144 dual-socket computes nodes, each with memory ranging from 96 to 768 gigabytes (GB), delivering a peak performance of 8 petaflops.

“With Eagle, we are gaining significant compute power to boost scientific discovery efforts and support our mission in advancing innovation in energy technologies,” said Steve Hammond, director of NREL’s Computational Science Center. “By collaborating with HPE, we are gaining better tools to improve simulation and modeling across complex events to unlock new insights.”

Eagle will be installed in NREL’s Energy System Integration Facility (ESIF) data center this summer and put into production use in January 2019.

For additional insight into HPE’s HPC offerings and industry collaborations, please visit HPE’s High Performance Computing Solutions.

1.)Eagle has a peak performance of 8 petaflops, which is 3.5x more powerful compared to existing NREL Peregrine system with 2.26 petaflops.Until Eagle, Peregrine was the largest HPC system dedicated to advancing renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. Source: https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/hpc-user-facility.html

2.) Data based on U.S. DOE Eagle announcement - available on 8/14/18