Mission Critical
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Facility
Golden, CO
Client: National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Architect: SmithGroup
Size: 181,621 SF
Completion: September 2012
The Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) on the campus of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will soon be the nation's only facility that can conduct integrated megawatt-scale testing of the component and strategies needed in order to safely move clean energy technologies onto the electrical grid "in-flight" at the speed and scale required to meet federal policy.
the ESIF will include a high-performance computing and data center (HPCDC) that will serve the breadth of NREL, expanding the laboratory's capabilities in modeling and simulation of renewable energy technologies and their integration into the existing energy infrastructure. the petaflop-scale (one petaflop equals one quadrillion floating-point operations per second) high performance computer will enable large-scale modeling and simulation of material properties, processes and fully integrated systems that would be too expensive, too dangerous, or even impossible to study by direct experimentation.
Not only will the HPCDC be the fastest computing system dedicated to renewable energy efficient and renewable energy technologies in the world, it will be one of the most energy efficient data centers in the world, operating at a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.05 annual average.
