The Nuclear Science User Facilities, or NSUF, program within the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy is set to activate the Teton supercomputer at Idaho National Laboratory, or INL, a move expected to significantly expand high-performance computing capacity and accelerate nuclear reactor and fuel research.
What Is Teton Supercomputer?
INL said Thursday, Teton is an HPE Cray EX 4000 system housed at the laboratory’s Collaborative Computing Center and operated under the NSUF program. The supercomputer was delivered in September 2025 and will be made available to NSUF users nationwide in January. It is ranked 85th on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
What Capabilities Does Teton Provide?
Teton is four times more powerful than Sawtooth, NSUF’s current flagship system, and is designed for high-fidelity, CPU-based nuclear simulations. The supercomputer comprises 1,024 compute nodes, each with 384 CPU cores and 768 gigabytes of memory, and can perform 20.8 quadrillion calculations per second. This capability enables advanced multiphysics simulations of reactor physics, materials behavior, and fuel cycle processes.
“NSUF is proud to be able to provide access to this level of performance to our user community,” said NSUF Director Brenden Heidrich. “The large number of nodes available in Teton allows our (High Performance Computing) team to support hundreds of users at one time or allocate all of them to a single massive project that was previously beyond our reach.”
How Will Teton Support Nuclear Energy Research?
Designed to support DOE’s Genesis Mission, Teton will expand modeling and simulation capabilities for advanced reactors, small modular reactors, microreactors and emerging fuel designs by enabling artificial intelligence-enabled workflows and digital twin development. The system’s computing capacity allows thousands of high-fidelity simulations to generate reduced-order models, helping shorten development timelines, expand researcher access and accelerate reactor design, monitoring, fuel research and complex physics analysis critical to national energy security.
Other Supercomputers Being Developed by DOE
In October 2025, DOE partnered with HPE, NVIDIA and Oracle to build the Mission and Vision supercomputers. The agency’s Argonne National Laboratory is also working with NVIDIA and Oracle on the Solstice and Equinox systems.
