Secretary Moniz has dedicated a new supercomputer—one of the world’s fastest and most energy efficient—at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). The high-performance computer for energy and the environment is not only one of the top 100 supercomputers in the world, but it is also one of the most energy efficient for its size.

The supercomputer is a 503 TFlops (trillion floating-point operations per second) computer that enables researchers to apply complex model simulations for advanced energy and environmental technology development. This is a unique tool tailored for engineering calculations in support of fossil energy research.

“This new capacity will give us the computational muscle to accelerate the development and design of large scale chemical looping reactors and carbon capture technologies that will allow us to use fossil fuels more cleanly,” said Secretary Moniz. “It will ensure that NETL remains on the forefront of this research, which is critical not only to our economic future but to the environment as well.”

Capable of running simulations ranging from the molecular level to modeling entire power plants and natural fuel reservoirs, the new computer provides enhanced visualization, data analysis, and data storage capabilities that will enable researchers to discover new materials, optimize designs, and predict operational characteristics.

All of the computational, visualization, network hardware, and primary storage servers are installed in a state-of-the-art modular datacenter, greatly improving its efficiency. It provides the new computer with one of the lowest power utilization efficiency (PUE) infrastructures available, at times using only 1 percent of total electrical consumption to cool the equipment. The increase in efficiency translates to electrical energy cost savings of approximately $450,000 annually.

NETL’s supercomputer’s key areas of application include multiphase computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, computational geophysics, and computational materials research.