by Brianna Crandall — September 10, 2012—The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has selected HP and Intel to provide a new energy-efficient high-performance computer (HPC) system dedicated to energy systems integration, renewable energy research, and energy efficiency technologies. The new center will provide additional computing resources to support the breadth of research at NREL, leading to increased efficiency and lower costs for research into clean energy technologies including solar photovoltaics, wind energy, electric vehicles, buildings technologies, and renewable fuels.
The $10 million HPC system will reside at the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF), under construction on the Golden, Colorado, campus. The new system will greatly expand NREL’s modeling and simulation capabilities, including advancing materials research and developing a deeper understanding of biological and chemical processes. It will also support research into fully integrated energy systems that would otherwise be too expensive, or even impossible, to study directly.
The HPC’s petascale computing capability (1 million billion calculations per second) is the world’s largest computing capability dedicated solely to renewable energy and energy efficiency research. “This unique capability sets NREL apart in our ability to continue groundbreaking research and analysis,” NREL Director Dan Arvizu said.
The HPC data center at NREL is designed to be the world’s most energy efficient, with an annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.06 or better. The average data center operates with a PUE of 1.91, according to 2009 data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star Program. NREL’s data center design is compact, resulting in short runs for both electrical and plumbing components. This project features a technology, currently under development, that uses warm water in the computing rack to efficiently cool the servers.
NREL will maximize the reuse of heat generated by the HPC system. The “waste heat” from the computer system will be used as the primary heat source in the ESIF offices and lab space. Excess heat can also be exported to adjacent buildings and other areas of the NREL campus. All together, the efficiency of the data center, the energy efficiency features of the HPC system, and the system’s ability to reuse heat combine to reduce overall energy use. The system is projected to deliver substantial energy savings and avoid significant costs through the efficiency improvements, helping to meet federal energy efficiency goals.
NREL notes that the new HPC data center is designed to reach the rare achievement among data centers of having both a world-leading PUE and reusing nearly all waste heat generated, and says that the research on renewable energy and new energy sources is “aimed to address humanity’s biggest challenges and will impact literally everyone on the globe.”
The HPC system will be deployed in two phases that will include scalable HP ProLiant SL230s and SL250s Generation 8 (Gen8) servers based on eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors as well as the next generation of servers featuring future 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture-based Intel Xeon processors and Intel Many Integrated Core architecture based Intel Xeon Phi co-processors. The first phase of the HPC installation will begin in November 2012, reaching petascale capacity in the summer of 2013. HP and Intel were selected after a competitive, open procurement process.
