About a year and a half ago, HPE announced that it had been selected to build the next supercomputer for the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL): Kestrel. Now, Kestrel has begun arriving at NREL – at least, for one of its partitions.

When complete, Kestrel will consist of 2,436 nodes. The vast bulk of those – 2,304 nodes – are CPU-based, with each node containing dual Intel Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” CPUs and 256GB of memory. Those nodes are currently being delivered and installed, following a supply chain disruption that NREL announced in December 2022 that delayed their arrival from the original planned installation in Q4 2022. Possibly also arriving are Kestrel’s 10 large-memory nodes, which have the same CPUs and 2TB of memory each.

NREL published a timelapse video of Kestrel’s arrival day, which is embedded below courtesy of the laboratory.

In announcing the installation delay, NREL had said that the CPU nodes would be available for use by mid-summer 2023; that timeline appears on track, with NREL’s operations teams currently installing not only the CPU-based nodes, but also the network and storage infrastructure for the system. (Kestrel will use HPE Slingshot-11 networking and will be supported by a 27PB parallel file system and a 1.2PB home file system.)

Later in the year (NREL is targeting fall), Kestrel’s GPU-accelerated nodes will arrive. Those come in two flavors: 132 nodes with dual AMD Epyc “Genoa” CPUs, quadruple Nvidia H100 GPUs and 384GB of memory; and 10 nodes with dual Sapphire Rapids CPUs and dual Nvidia A40 GPUs. Overall, the system is expected to deliver 44 peak petaflops – more than five times the power of its (similarly HPE-built, Intel-based, bird-named) predecessor, Eagle, which remains operational.

Kestrel will serve as the new dedicated system for the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), where it will serve research needs in a wide variety of energy-associated fields; NREL highlighted possible applications in optimizing charging station infrastructure for electric vehicles and modeling materials for solar cells. “From driving discoveries in microscopic battery chemistry to simulating and enabling global energy infrastructure transition, Kestrel will accelerate our research capabilities to meet administration goals for clean and renewable energy,” said Kevin Lynn, grid integration director and computing program manager for the EERE office, in an interview with NREL’s Justin Daugherty.

“Supercomputers like Kestrel are critical to the energy transition,” added Alejandro Moreno, acting assistant secretary for the office.

To learn more about Kestrel’s arrival, visit the “Countdown to Kestrel” page here.