HPE Selected by US DoE’s NREL to Build New Supercomputer to Accelerate Discovery of Renewable Power

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that it is has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a world leader in advancing energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, to build a new supercomputer to support ongoing R&D that will transform energy from geothermal, water, wind, solar, and fuels.

The new supercomputer will also support energy initiatives related to security, resilience, storage, systems integration, energy justice, and community transitions, as well as transportation and mobility, buildings, and advanced manufacturing.

In continuing its naming theme of supercomputers that honors various bird species, such as with previous system generations named Peregrine and Eagle, NREL has named the new supercomputer Kestrel, after the American falcon.

HPE will build Kestrel using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, a next-generation high performance computing (HPC) platform that provides end-to-end HPC solutions to scale performance and harness insights more efficiently through advanced modeling, simulation, AI and analytics capabilities.

As the dedicated HPC system for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (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.

“HPE has a long-standing collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) where we have developed joint high performance computing and AI solutions to innovate new approaches that reduce energy consumption and lower operating costs,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC, at HPE.