National Renewable Energy Laboratory Energy Systems Integration Facility

JE Dunn + SmithGroupJJR completed this expansion to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s South Table Mountain campus: the Energy System Integration Facility (ESIF). This design-build project consists of three buildings, each linked together under one roof: a three-story, 44,000 SF office building; a 37,000 SF data center; and a 84,000 SF high bay research laboratory. Also included are conference areas, visualization rooms, a break room, atrium lobby and a connector between the buildings. ESIF is a LEED Platinum certified building.

The high-performance computing and data center (HPCDC) expands 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 enables large-scale modeling and simulation of material properties, processes and fully integrated systems that is too expensive, too dangerous, or even impossible, to study by direct experimentation.

Not only is the HPCDC the fastest computing system dedicated to renewable energy technologies in the world, it is one of the most energy efficient data centers in the world operating at a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.05 annual average.