HPCwire: CoolEmAll Project to Address Data Center Energy Consumption

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February 22, 2012

CoolEmAll Project to Address Data Center Energy Consumption

LONDON, UK and POZNAN, Poland, Feb. 22 -- A new European Commission-funded project aims to tackle the energy-efficiency implications of increasing investment in new data centers.

The CoolEmAll program will take a holistic approach to improving data center energy efficiency covering not just the role of IT hardware and facilities equipment but also the applications they ultimately support. The project will deliver and enhance two key tools (monitoring software and a prototype server design) to help data centers monitor and manage their energy consumption.

The energy efficiency goals of the CoolEmAll project are particularly relevant given the EC’s February 2012 announcement about establishing Europe as a leader in High Performance Computing (HPC). The EC plans to double its investment in HPC from €630 million to €1.2 billion. Half of the budget is earmarked for development and training and for new centers of excellence, creating thousands of jobs.

The CoolEmAll project, along with other EC-funded datacenter and HPC projects should benefit from this investment and HPC’s higher profile in general. Members of the project consortium include several high-profile HPC research organizations such as Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) and the High Performance Computing Center University of Stuttgart (HLRS).

Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President responsible for the Digital Agenda, has said that HPC is a crucial enabler for European industry and for more jobs in Europe. “It’s investments like HPC that deliver innovations improving daily life. We’ve got to invest smartly in this field because we cannot afford to leave it to our competitors.”

The CoolEmAll project addresses an important aspect of HPC - energy efficiency. Supercomputers, and their related datacenter infrastructure, consume large amounts of energy and resources.

The CoolEmAll project will evaluate datacenter and HPC energy efficiency by looking at the interaction of high performance computing hardware, datacenter facilities (heating and cooling) as well as the role of applications in energy and carbon efficiency.

The project will develop two key tools to help monitor and manage datacenter energy consumption:

Simulation, Visualisation and Decision support (SVD) toolkit – The SVD toolkit is a real-time Computational Fluid Dynamics modelling tool. It will allow datacenter planners to model the energy efficiency implications of physical placement of servers within a facility, different approaches to cooling, as well as the role played by applications and workload.

Blueprints/designs of energy-efficient hardware – The other main outcome of the project will be a set of open source designs based on a high-density server known as the RECS | Compute Box developed by German start-up Christmann informationstechnik. These designs, along with the SVD toolkit, should allow other projects, or potentially commercial datacenter operators, to build on the research done by the CoolEmAll consortium.

About the CoolEmAll Consortium

The main goals of the three-year CoolEmAll project is to increase understanding of how different factors impact the energy-efficiency of data centers and to design tools to help cut data center energy consumption. This initiative brings together some of Europe’s greatest supercomputing experts including prestigious university IT research departments and vendors in the supercomputing industry. The seven members of the CoolEmAll consortium are Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, The Toulouse IT Research Institute, High Performance Computing Centre University of Stuttgart, The Catalonia Institute for Energy Research, Atos, 451 Research and Christmann informationstechnik. http://www.coolemall.eu/

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Source: CoolEmAll Consortium

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