Georgia Tech to develop sustainable power consumption

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And it uses recycled HPC.

Georgia Tech announced this week during SC that they’re starting a new green power initiative

To help understand and reduce power consumption, the Georgia Institute of Technology has launched Green IT. The effort considers power consumption across the entire “energy stack,” ranging from the power consumed by modern multi-core platforms, to the board and rack levels, to the entire data center. Corralling expertise from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, College of Engineering and Office of Information Technology, the consortium is a multidisciplinary effort that looks at how to build large-scale systems that use less power. The goal is to better understand where and how power is used, and to make it possible to coordinate power usage across different data center components, such as the cooling and the IT infrastructure.

…Often, research efforts like these must use simulated machines, with heaters substituting for computers; but the Green IT group will be using a large-scale commodity system, a 1,000-node IBM BladeCenter, to conduct its investigations.  The system was previously used by the Center for the Study of Systems Biology.

“Rather than junking the old machine, Georgia Tech decided that we could recycle it and use it for energy-efficient IT research along with a host of other uses,” said Schwan.