Energy Efficient and Sustainable HPC at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Power consumption in US data centers has been escalating at an alarming rate. In response to Public Law 109-431, EPA reported that electricity usage by US data centers accounted for 1.5% of the total electricity used in the US in 2006. They projected that if current data center operating practices continue, electricity usage will almost double to 2.9% of the total electricity used in the US in 2011 (EPA, 2007). Consequently EPA issued a call to action to both government and industry to collaborate and set aggressive goals to reduce power consumption in data centers. In the spirit of responding to the findings and recommendations of the EPA report, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has teamed with several key organizations including: The Green Grid (TGG), ASHRAE TC9.9, IBM, 3M, and SprayCool. As part of this effort, a highly instrumented liquid-cooled cluster has been installed at PNNL. The cluster is housed in an 800 ft2 data center which resides in a mixed-use data center with a significant amount of instrumentation as well. The eventual objective of the effort is to be able to report the real-time power consumption, energy efficiency, and productivity of the liquid-cooled data center. Preliminary results frommore » the effort at PNNL are reported in this paper. Thermal results are reported for the hottest server components, including the microprocessors and memory DIMMs. Under all conditions tested, the components have not exceeded manufacturers’ specifications. More importantly, the data show that the liquid-cooled servers can be maintained within specifications while rejecting to non-chilled facility water at 78°F (25.6°C). Furthermore, a reasonable extrapolation suggests that the specifications can still be maintained at 86°F (30°C). In an effort to address global warming, work has started on the qualification of a new 3M Fluoroketone fluid that has a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 1. This GWP is the lowest published value of all commercially available coolants. Details are provided in the body of this paper.« less