Entries filed under “Green HPC”

Over at The Green Grid, Director Roger Tipley writes that a major challenge for his organization is helping datacenter managers to recognize how far they should be pushing the efficiency agenda in their organizations.

If your car used virtually the same amount of energy when traveling at 80 miles per hour as when it was parked, you would assume there was something seriously wrong with the engine. But this is essentially how many data centres function. There have been many efficiency improvements stemming from areas such as cooling and virtualisation. However, the great challenge remains to minimise the energy consumed when parts of the servers are idle. We need to get IT leaders to push harder in this front of the war on DC efficiency.”

Along these lines, The Green Grid offers these new resources:

• Data Centre Life Cycle Analysis Guidelines
• Energy Policy Research & Implications For Data Centres In EMEA
• Data Center Efficiency and IT Equipment Reliability at Wider Operating Temperature and Humidity Ranges

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Over at Forward Thinking, Michael J. Miller writes that the top system on the Green500 achieved an amazing 2.5 gigaflops per watt.

This time, the top system is a relatively small cluster (#253 on the TOP500 list), the Beacon system run by the National Institute of Computational Science and the University of Tennessee. It is built using Appro’s GreenBlades, each running 2.6GHz Xeon E5-2670 processors (8 cores/16 threads) and Xeon Phi 5110P co-processors, using Infiniband FDR interconnects.

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This week The Green Grid global task force announced three new efficiency metric measurement guidelines: the use of the Green Energy Coefficient (GEC), Energy Reuse Factor (ERF) and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) metrics.

The guidelines include:

• Green Energy Coefficient – GEC quantifies the portion of a facility’s energy that comes from green sources. The metric is computed as green energy consumed by the data center (kWh) divided by total energy consumed by the data center (kWh).
• Energy Reuse Factor – ERF identifies the portion of energy that is exported for reuse outside of the data center. ERF is computed as reuse energy divided by total energy consumed by the data center.
• Carbon Usage Effectiveness – CUE enables an assessment of the total GHG emissions of a data center relative to its IT energy consumption. CUE is computed as the total carbon dioxide emission equivalents (CO₂eq) from the energy consumption of the facility divided by the total IT energy consumption.

We want to make it as easy as possible for the data center community to understand and embrace these metrics, and how they can work together,” said Joyce Dickerson, Board Member, The Green Grid. “When implemented correctly, they can save organizations a lot of time, money, and additional resources. Although there is more work to do, we think this will bring us one step closer to a universally adopted set of metrics, indices, and measurement protocols that will have a positive impact on the industry.”

The Green Grid and the task force intends to continue collaboration in the ongoing effort to improve data center energy and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission efficiencies. Read the Full Story.