Come the summer of 2013, the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) will use one of the world’s most energy efficient data centers to handle complex renewable energy and energy efficiency research.
NREL selected Intel and Hewlett Packard to design the $10 million High Performance Computer center in Golden, Colorado.
It will feature the largest supercomputer dedicated solely to energy efficiency and renewable energy research – it will use more than 3,200 powerful Intel Xeon microprocessors to run super fast – at peak performance it will crunch more than a million billion calculations per second.
It will be one of the first to use Intel’s Xeon Phi co-processors (which haven’t been released commercially yet). Phi co-processors are specifically focused on reducing energy consumption for high-performance computing applications, such as sophisticated wind modeling simulations that will be run at the NREL facility.
Hewlett-Packard is developing a cooling system draws heat away from supercomputer components by running warm water through the racks.
HP’s cooling system also captures waste heat and re-uses it as the facility’s primary heat source and, potentially other areas of the NREL campus.
Taken together, the facility could earn a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.06 or better. PUE is a data center metric that measures the amount of energy needed to keep servers, hard drives, networking and other data center gear running – the ideal rating is 1.0.
Typically, data centers have ratings of 1.91, according to EPA Energy Star data. That means for every watt of power used, one watt of power must be used for cooling and other facility infrastructure.
"At NREL, we have taken a holistic approach to sustainable computing," says Steve Hammond, NREL Computational Science director. "This new system will allow NREL to increase our computational capabilities while being mindful of energy and water used. We will take advantage of both the bytes of information produced and the BTUs produced. The new HPC system will dramatically improve our modeling and simulations capabilities used to advance energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies as well as energy system integration."
NREL plans to use the data center as a demonstration lab for other organizations seeking to squeeze more energy efficiency into data center designs.
Data centers currently use about 2% of the world’s electricity, and that consumption is growing at a rate of 12% annually, making green data centers a growth industry.
eBay is building the largest non-utility fuel cell installation in the US and Apple’s new mammoth data center will also deploy Bloom fuel cells. Even with 5 MW of fuel cells combined with 40 MW of solar (the largest corporate solar system in the US) it isn’t enough to provide all the energy.
Companies like Facebook and Google are also working on reducing water use in data centers.
Google has cut energy use in its data centers 50% and uses less than 1% of the total electricity used by data centers worldwide. It still leads the industry on efficiency and using renewables, increasingly using wind energy to power its massive data infrastructure.
Facebook is building a massive 120 MW data center near the Arctic Circle to reduce energy consumption for cooling and its Open Compute Project is sharing best practices on energy efficient data centers.
For more on the energy efficiency and energy sourcing practices of the world’s biggest data centers, check out this report, "How Clean is Your Cloud":
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Far and away, the most efficient data-centers are sea water cooled. The ocean provides an ecologically sound, unlimited amount of thermal cooling energy. This is the most efficient sustainable green cooling and energy savings.