FY24 HPC Allocation Cycle: Call for Requests

May 10, 2023

The National Renewable Energy Lab (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). EERE’s mission is to create and sustain American leadership in the transition to a global clean energy economy. Research and development projects in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and sustainable transportation that are funded by EERE Offices or aligned with the EERE mission are eligible to utilize these resources. EERE high-performance computing focus areas include Energy Systems Integration, Materials Science, Forecasting, Manufacturing, and Fluid Dynamics. ​Due to the increase in capacity in FY24 outlined below, EERE may additionally grant allocations to mission-relevant computing projects that are supported by industry collaborators or University partnerships.

NREL runs an annual open call on behalf of EERE for research and development projects to request use of a defined quantity, or allocation, of the compute resources at NREL. This notification serves as the announcement of this call for allocation requests. The allocation period of performance runs from October 1, 2023 through September 30, 2024.

Resources will be allocated on NREL’s new third generation supercomputer, Kestrel, which is coming online during summer of 2023. Kestrel is being installed in two phases: Phase 1, to be installed during summer of 2023, is comprised of the 2,304 Standard compute nodes (CPU-only nodes). Phase 2 will become available January of 2024 and will be comprised of the 132 Accelerated nodes (GPU nodes). When fully installed, Kestrel represents a significant expansion in computing capability at 44 petaflops. Resources to be allocated on Kestrel for FY24 include 192 million “Allocation Units”, or AUs on standard compute nodes; 82 million AUs on accelerated nodes; 30 petabytes of shared data storage and up to 60 petabytes of long-term data storage. Standard compute nodes provide 10 AUs per node hour and accelerated compute nodes provide 100 AUs per node hour. Kestrel standard compute nodes have two (2) Intel Sapphire Rapids 52-core processors. Kestrel accelerated nodes have four (4) NVIDIA H100 Tensor core GPUs and two (2) AMD Genoa 64-core processors.

Learn more about The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy here: https://www.energy.gov/eere/office-energy-efficiency-renewable-energy

Additional information about Kestrel is available here: https://www.nrel.gov/hpc/kestrel-system-configuration.html.

Additional information about Allocation Units is available here: https://www.nrel.gov/hpc/system-resource-allocation-unit.html.​

Allocations may be requested by completing the online Allocation request form, available here: https://hpcprojects.nrel.gov/

Users are encouraged to submit requests for projects where a proposal has been submitted or is pending, as well as ongoing projects. Requesting an allocation will not affect the funding status of any submitted or pending proposals. Allocation requests must be completed and submitted by June 9, 2023. The latest version of the call, the request form and additional information may be found on the NREL HPC website: https://www.nrel.gov/hpc/resource-allocation-requests.html.

Users should request an NREL account by May 30, 2023 to expedite submission. Users experiencing difficulty accessing the online request form may contact hpc-requests@nrel.gov for alternate submission procedures.