The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
January 08, 2009
More Bang for Less Buck: UB's Supercomputers Go 'Green'
1 | 2 | 3 All »
Upgrade boosts center's power by 50 percent, yet saves $150,000 per year
BUFFALO, N.Y., Jan. 7 -- In the world of supercomputers, practical considerations like energy consumption have traditionally been overshadowed by the emphasis on high performance. But as energy costs have increased, computational scientists at the University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research (CCR) have found a way to do more cutting-edge science while consuming less power.
A new energy-efficiency upgrade to CCR, located in UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, will realize energy savings of approximately $150,000 per year, while boosting the center's total capacity from 13 teraflops (trillion floating operations per second) to 20 teraflops.
The upgrade was made possible by a $300,000 contract from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and a $150,000 investment by UB.
"Current trends in datacenters have led to a crisis in terms of electrical and cooling capacity, where it is increasingly difficult to meet the expanding power requirements of supercomputers," said Thomas Furlani, Ph.D., director of CCR and principal investigator on the NYSERDA contract. "Over the next year, CCR, a leading academic supercomputing center, will replace one-quarter of its old servers with state-of-the-art energy efficient servers that will not only dramatically reduce CCR's power and cooling requirements, but will also increase its compute capacity by more than 50 percent."
Installation of the new high efficiency servers will take place during the spring 2009 semester.
The UB/NYSERDA investment will pay for itself in about three years, with UB recovering its investment in the first year.
"This joint NYSERDA/UB demonstration project will raise the public's awareness of the significant energy savings achievable in datacenter upgrades," said Robert G. Callender, NYSERDA vice president for programs. "Installation of high efficiency servers and cooling technology in business and institutions is a critical focus area for NYSERDA.
"Given the state's increasing dependence on information technology, both as an economic engine and as an essential tool for knowledge discovery, it is expected that the project will generate substantial interest, as both academic, governmental and industrial organizations struggle to balance the need for additional computing and storage power with the costs associated with running energy-hungry datacenters," said Bruce Holm, executive director of UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences and UB professor of pediatrics, gynecology and obstetrics, and pharmacology and toxicology.
According to Furlani, the increasing computational power offered by rapid advances in processor design and fabrication has been offset by limitations in the ability to power and cool the high-density computer racks, even as demand for high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure continually increases.
Page: 1 of 31 | 2 | 3 All »
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
New Paper: Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Learn how domain experts can run VHLL programs like MATLAB® on a variety of high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming and how to work with the largest datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Feature Articles
Spider Up and Spinning Connections to All Computing Platforms at ORNL
Spider, the world's biggest Lustre-based, centerwide file system, has been fully tested to support Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new petascale Cray XT4/XT5 Jaguar supercomputer and is now offering early access to scientists.
Read More...
Wolfram Alpha: A Web-Based Application That Embraced Supercomputers
Wolfram Alpha, the Web-based computational engine introduced in May, is not a traditional supercomputing application, but relies on supercomputers to satisfy its unique requirements.
Read More...
TeraGrid '09: Student Participation Soars
There was a new energy at this year's TeraGrid '09 conference thanks to an outstanding turnout for the student program. Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, more than 100 high school, undergraduate and graduate students were able to participate in the conference.
Read More...
Top Headlines
3D Seismic Data: Taking a Smarter Approach to Interpretation
Jul 09 | Engineer Live | The demand for computational tools to underpin the 3D seismic interpretation process has never been more apparent. Read more...
Engineering Unemployment Soared in 2Q to 8.6%
Jul 08 | EE Times | Unemployment for U.S. engineers has reached record levels, according to government figures. Read more...
Gartner Adjusts 2009 IT Spend Downward Again
Jul 08 | Network World | Global spending for 2009 projected to drop 6 percent, for a total of $3.2 trillion. Read more...
Concurrent and Parallel Are Not The Same
Jul 08 | Linux Magazine | Portability or efficiency? Neither is guaranteed when writing explicit parallel code. Read more...
800 TFLOP Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU Unveiled, Not for Gamers
Jul 07 | Ars Technica | Japanese company builds custom ASIC to accelerate real-time ray traced rendering for the auto industry. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Jul 10 | | Engineers, scientists, and other domain experts depend on the productivity enabled by very high-level language (VHLL) tools like MATLAB® and Python. However, as datasets grow larger and programs get more sophisticated, ordinary desktop computers can no longer keep up. The paper explores how to run VHLL programs on high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming. Work with large datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Multimedia
Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc -
Parallel Programmer
Cardiff University -
Principal Software Research Engineer
Indiana University -
Post Doctoral Researcher - Exascale Stream Computing
IBM - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA