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HPE builds a new supercomputer for renewable energy research
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, has chosen Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. to build a new supercomputer it’s planning to use to power its research in energy efficiency.
The “Eagle” supercomputer, announced today, will be installed within one of the NREL’s data centers this summer before coming online in January next year. NREL says the supercomputer is 3.5 times more powerful than its existing high-performance computing systems and also more energy efficient.
The NREL is a federal government lab that’s dedicated to researching energy efficiency and renewable energy. It’s funded by the U.S. Department of Energy but run by outside contractors.
NREL is installing the Eagle supercomputer so it can run detailed models that simulate complex processes and systems for a wide range of different energy sources, including wind energy, and also “vehicle technologies.”
With regard to wind power, the NREL is planning to use Eagle to analyze subsystem challenges and systems-level interactions that are influenced by the atmosphere and variable terrain. As for vehicle technologies, the lab’s research there pertains to advanced batteries and other innovations in electrification, officials said.
HPE’s SGI 8600 system, which is designed to run complex HPC workloads at “petaflop speeds,” will power Eagle. The supercomputer is cooled by a new “warm liquid cooling system” that HPE reckons can capture 97 percent of wasted heat for reuse.
“High-performance computing has lots of promise for next-generation applications,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. “This is a good example of what can be achieved with large scale machines at NREL, and it’s a good win for HPE both from a business perspective as well as for energy research.”
HPE has enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the DOE, partnering with it to apply advanced supercomputing and HPC solutions to accelerate research at dozens of its agencies.
Most recently in June, the company said it was teaming up with the DOE and Sandia National Laboratories to build the world’s largest supercomputer based on ARM chip architecture, rather than the x86 architecture that Eagle is based on. Astra, as it’s called, will be used by the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration agency to run advanced models that will improve the analysis of data-intensive science experiments in areas such as national security and energy.
Image: sonnydelrosario/pixabay
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