HPE's Eagle Supercomputer Is Pushing The Renewable Energy Envelope

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise is set to unleash its new Eagle supercomputer, which is being billed as the world's largest high performance compute system dedicated to advancing energy renewable technologies.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry was slated to address the HPE breakthrough at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo.

The new Eagle system -- which will be installed at the NREL data center this summer and put into production in January 2019 -- is powered by the HPE SGI 8600, which HPE designed from the ground up to run “complex HPC workloads at petaflop speeds – or a quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point operations per second (FLOPS).’’

The Intel Xeon based system is made up of 76,104 compute cores, each with 96, 192, or 768 gigabytes (GB) of memory to deliver peak performance of 8 petaflops.

Eagle, which is 3.5 times more powerful than the current Department of Energy system, includes a liquid cooling system designed to capture 97 percent of wasted heat that can be reused in other areas of its hosted facility.

Michael Goldstein, CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., solution provider, said the Eagle breakthrough is another sign of HPE's high performance compute market leadership.

"HPE is the king of high performance compute," said Goldstein. "This Eagle system is a mind blower. I can remember being amazed by a Pentium processor 20 years ago with just 16K of RAM."

Goldstein praised HPE for delivering next generation compute systems that are sure to act as the foundation for advances in artificial intelligence and 5G.

"AI and 5G are going to allow us to make internet of things a reality," he said. "Without high end compute like this Eagle system we will never be able to harness AI and 5G technologies. When 5G comes out we are going to be able to connect everything everywhere."

Goldstein said HPE’s acquisition two years ago of SGI for $275 million was a smart buy. "You've got to give to (HPE CEO) Antonio Neri credit for doubling down on high performance compute," said Goldstein. "Neri is a forward thinking technology innovator."

Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI Group for HPE, said in a prepared statement that the Eagle system is an example of HPE's strong commitment to architecting technologies to power the “next wave” of supercomputing.

"Through Eagle and our overall ongoing collaboration with the U.S. DOE and NREL, we are advancing research to bolster innovation in energy and sustainability," said Mannel.