High-performance computing and analytic capabilities at the Energy Systems Integration Facility enable study and simulation of material properties, processes, and fully integrated systems that would otherwise be too expensive, too dangerous, or even impossible to study by direct experimentation. With state-of-the-art computational modeling and predictive simulation capabilities, the Energy System Integration Facility's high-performance computer reduces the risks and uncertainty that are often barriers to the adoption of new and innovative technologies.
The Energy Systems Integration Facility is home to Peregrine, the largest high-performance computing system in the world exclusively dedicated to advancing renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. Peregrine runs a Linux operating system and has a dedicated high-performance parallel Lustre file system with about 1 petabyte (1015 bytes or characters) of online file storage.
The peak performance of Peregrine is approximately 1.19 petaflops, or 1.19 million billion floating point (mathematical) operations per second, making Peregrine the 30th fastest computer in the world. On an annual basis, the high-performance computing system can deliver approximately 12 million node-hours of computational capacity.
The mass storage system provides an additional 3 petabytes of long-term data storage capacity for high-performance computing. It is designed to keep the most-used data quickly accessible and to economically store data that are accessed less often.
Learn more about high-performance computing at NREL.
The state-of-the-art visualization and simulation capabilities at the Energy Systems Integration Facility leverage the high-performance computing capability of the Peregrine supercomputer.
The Energy Systems Integration Facility includes state-of-the-art visualization and collaboration tools to promote knowledge discovery in energy systems integration. Visualization labs use advanced technology to provide onsite and remote viewing of experimental data, high-resolution visual imagery, and large-scale simulation data.
Features include a large rear-projected, 14-megapixel image display, where large-scale, high-resolution visual imagery can be used to effectively convey information and illustrate research findings to stakeholders and visitors. The high-resolution, large-scale display provides researchers and others with the visual "real estate" to enable large-scale simulations, ensembles of simulations, and highly detailed visual analytics displays.
A stereoscopic immersive virtual environment is composed of six projectors that illuminate two surfaces: a wall and the floor. The projected space can be used in conjunction with an optical tracker, and the visualizations respond to the movement of the user. This allows users to physically explore and interact with their complex data in new ways that promote and accelerate understanding and innovation. Researchers and partners from all disciplines of science and engineering can interactively visualize highly complex, large-scale data, systems, and operations.
The Energy Systems Integration Facility Secure Data Center provides secure management, storage, processing, and visualization of industry proprietary data. Facility partners can submit sensitive operational, maintenance, safety, and cost data to the Secure Data Center on a regular basis, typically once every three months.
At present, the Secure Data Center houses the National Fuel Cell Technology Evaluation Center. It uses the Secure Data Center's internal network of servers, storage, computers, backup systems, and software to efficiently process raw data, digest time series data for visualization, and create composite data products that show the status and progress of fuel cell technologies without identifying individual companies or revealing proprietary information. This approach can be applied to any technology class of interest.
