Researchers Build Two Computing Solutions Amid Global Supply Shortages
Imagine spending $6.5 million in 30 seconds. For automakers, that was a price worth
paying to advertise their latest electric vehicles to over 100 million viewers during
the 2022 Super Bowl.
Celebrity cameos and special effects may pique interest, but they cannot overcome
the barriers that prevent people from buying electric vehicles or adopting other clean
energy technologies.
A 2020 survey by Consumer Reports cited the cost of new electric cars and limited
access to charging stations as the biggest roadblocks for the public.
Creating clean energy options that are affordable and accessible for everyone is possible
at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), where researchers rely on high-performance
computing to transform data into the models and simulations of their breakthrough
discoveries.
NREL has its foot on the (electric) pedal to clean up our entire energy economy at
an unprecedented speed and scale. No delay—not even a pandemic-induced global supply
shortage—can nudge the laboratory off course, with its computational science experts achieving some dazzling feats of creative problem-solving.
A New Challenge
Whether it is creating more efficient, cleaner transportation or developing better
buildings, grids, and solar, water, geothermal, and wind energy generation and storage,
the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) relies on NREL to tackle a wide range of energy
challenges. In fact, of all 17 national laboratories, NREL is the only laboratory
solely dedicated to energy efficiency and renewable energy research for DOE.
Each of those energy challenges requires the powerful computing capabilities of NREL’s
supercomputers—like Eagle and the highly anticipated Kestrel—to help researchers rapidly identify insights and accelerate solutions.
About 85% of NREL’s high-performance computing (HPC) time is dedicated to DOE projects.
But in the final months of 2020, DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) asked NREL
to plan to accommodate their anticipated doubling of computing resource need by 2022.
A Swift Solution
The advanced computing and computational science experts at NREL were tasked with
a considerable challenge: design a world-class HPC resource almost half the size of
Eagle that could be operational within a year. This is an aggressive timeline for
a normal year, made worse by global semiconductor chip shortages and supply chain
delays caused by COVID-19.
Nonetheless, the resulting machine—appropriately named Swift—was completed and became
operational in NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) last summer. Although Swift only physically occupies one server row in the
ESIF, it packs 2 petabytes of storage…