United States Nrel Tender

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory NREL has selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE to build its third-generation high performance computing HPC system called Kestrel. Named for a falcon with keen eyesight and intelligence Kestrels moniker is apropos for its missionto rapidly advance the U.S. Department of Energys DOEs energy research and development RD efforts to deliver transformative energy solutions to the entire United States.Installation of the new system will begin in the fall of 2022 in NRELs Energy Systems Integration Facility ESIF data center. Kestrel will complement the laboratorys current supercomputer Eagle during the transition. When completedin early 2023Kestrel will accelerate energy efficiency and renewable energy research at a pace and scale more than five times greater than Eagle with approximately 44 petaflops of computing power. Eagle enables RD breakthroughs across multiple programs within DOEs Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy EERE these breakthroughs are a promising preview of achievable advancements with the highly anticipated Kestrel.As the dedicated HPC system for EERE Kestrel will play a critical role in computing across the research portfolio advancing research in computational materials continuum mechanics and large-scale simulation and planning for future energy systems. Rapidly advancing applications and technologies in artificial intelligence AI and machine learning are fostering innovation and expansion of research into new directions for computing. These workflows drive complementary physics and data-driven approaches by fusing simulation with new sensor data sources. Kestrels heterogeneous architecturewhich includes both CPU-only and GPU-accelerated nodesis designed to enable these emerging workflows providing EERE and industry partners with the ability to tackle the energy challenges for moving into a renewable and sustainable future.Years of collaborative work in the HPC domain mean that NREL and HPE are poised to successfully execute the Kestrel deployment beginning in the fall of 2022. HPE will build Kestrel using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer with design capabilities that are fully compatible with the warm-water waste heat recovery system currently used in NRELs ESIF data center.Kestrel will be composed of a balanced capability of future next generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors code-named Sapphire Rapids and NVIDIA A100NEXT Tensor Core GPUs to accelerate AI. The system will also feature HPE Slingshot an Ethernet fabric to address higher speed and congestion control for larger data-intensive and AI workloads. With high-speed connectivity connecting more than 75 petabytes of parallel file system storage using the Cray ClusterStor E1000 from HPE users will be empowered to tackle complex data-centric workflows and immerse themselves in interactive data analytic visualizations.