NREL Acquires Powerful New High-Performance Computing System
Eagle will be 3.5 times more powerful than current system dedicated to energy research
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has selected its next high-performance computing (HPC) system, which will be used to advance early-stage R&D on energy technologies spanning multiple DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) programs.
The new system, named Eagle, will be installed this summer in NREL’s Energy System Integration Facility (ESIF) data center and put into production use in January 2019.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will build Eagle, which will include the latest Intel Xeon processors. The new high-performance computer will have a peak performance of 8.0 petaflops, meaning it can carry out 8 million-billion calculations per second—an approximately three-fold increase in the amount of scientific computing capability relative to Peregrine, the current NREL supercomputer.
Like Peregrine, Eagle is a warm-water liquid cooled system in which 97% of the waste heat will be captured and available for re-use in office and lab space. In addition to the computational capability, the acquisition includes a high-speed parallel centralized file system and data storage components provided by Data Direct Networks.
Eagle Quick Facts
Key features of the new HPC system include:
- 8.0-petaflop HPE SGI 8600 system with Intel Skylake processors
- 2,114 compute nodes, each with 96, 192, or 768 gigabytes (GB) of memory
- 296 terabytes of total memory
- 14 petabytes of high-speed data storage
- Mellanox EDR InfiniBand high-speed interconnect.
View the DOE news release to learn more about Eagle.
For more information on NREL’s computational science capabilities and facilities, visit the NREL Computational Science website.