NREL's Peregrine supercomputer honored by two magazines with Editor's Choice awards

By: InnovatioNews Wednesday December 24, 2014 0 comments Tags: ESIF, Golden, Gregg Beckham, HP Apollo 8000, NREL, Peregrine, R&D Magazine, Steve Hammond

 

GOLDEN - Two prestigious scientific magazines have awarded the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) with Editor's Choice awards for the Peregrine high-performance computer and the groundbreaking research it has made possible.

The Apollo 8000 system from HP has won one of R&D Magazine's Editor's Choice Awards. The supercomputer created by HP and NREL uses warm water to cool its servers.

Internally, the heat generated by the computer's chips is transferred to water circulating through the machine, with the resulting hot water used to heat offices and laboratories in NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF).

Each year, R&D awards 100 top scientific and tech innovations in the U.S., with only three of those receiving the additional honor of an Editor's Choice Award.

In addition, HPCwire magazine named NREL as co-winner of its Editor's Choice - Top Supercomputing Achievement Award, honoring NREL and the Texas Advanced Computing Center for their work in high-performance computers in support of research on converting biomass to fuels.

That work was led by NREL Senior Engineer Gregg Beckham.

"This is significant because, while NREL's new facility and the HPC system have been recognized recently for their advances in energy efficiency, this HPCwire award recognizes how these HPC resources are being used to advance important areas of science and technology," said Steve Hammond, director of NREL's Computational Science Center.