About NREL HPC

Welcome

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) provides High Performance Computing and related capabilities to support the mission of the Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). The NREL HPC system is the largest HPC system in the world dedicated to advancing renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies.

Research and development projects that are funded by EERE Offices or aligned with the EERE mission are eligible to utilize these resources.

Computing, Visualization and Storage Resources

Peregrine

Peregrine is NREL's flagship HPC capability. Peregrine has 6,912 Intel Xeon E5-2670 "SandyBridge" processor cores, 24,192 Intel Xeon E5-2695v2 "IvyBridge" processor cores, and 27,648 Intel Xeon E5-2670v3 "Haswell" cores for a total of 58,752 Intel Xeon processor cores. These processors provide a total of about 1.68 PetaFLOPS. Peregrine also has 576 Intel Phi many-core co-processors with an aggregate performance of about 582 TeraFLOPS.  In total Peregrine is capable of 2.26 PetaFLOPS.

The nodes that comprise Peregrine are connected using FDR (Fourteen Data Rate, or 56 Gb/sec) InfiniBand. Peregrine runs the Linux Operating System and has a dedicated Lustre file system with about 2.25 Petabytes of online storage.

Gyrfalcon

Gyrfalcon, also known as the "Mass Storage System", is a large multi-tiered data archive system intended primarily for the long term storage of data associated with projects with allocations on NREL HPC systems. The system includes a disk storage system as well as an Oracle StorageTek tape library with nine T10000C tape drives. It uses Oracle's QFS file system and SAM archiving software, which allows users to simply copy data to and from the file system without knowing or worrying about which tier the data is stored on. It has a capacity of over 3 Petabytes of user data.

The Mass Storage System is available to all Peregrine user accounts and projects and is also available to users who don't have access to Peregrine.

Visualization

The ESIF Insight Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) combines state-of-the-art visualization and collaboration tools to promote knowledge discovery in energy systems integration. Located adjacent to NREL's high-performance computing data center, the Insight Center uses advanced visualization technology to provide on-site and remote viewing of experimental data, high-resolution visual imagery and large-scale simulation data.

In addition, Peregrine is equipped with several dedicated large-memory GPU-equipped visualization nodes. These can be used for remote visualization of OpenGL-based applications using TurboVNC and VirtualGL.

Data Security Policy

The NREL High Performance Computing Center computer systems are operated as research systems and may only contain data related to scientific research.  These systems are categorized as low per FIPS-199 and protected to the NIST 800-53 low security control baseline.
 
The NREL HPC center computer systems control data access via username and password authentication for network access, and UNIX directory and file permissions for data storage.   Network and storage systems provide no explicit encryption.  Users are responsible for protecting their data files and agree that NREL’s HPC security control implementation is sufficient for their work. In addition, these systems may not store or process export controlled data.

For more information, please see the policy page.

Request an allocation to use our systems

On behalf of EERE, NREL runs an annual open call for requests in which research and development projects can request use of the compute resources at NREL (called an allocation). Go to the allocations page to request an allocation.

Getting Help

For help, or if you have questions about our systems and policies, send email to hpc-help@nrel.gov.