HPCwire: More Bang for Less Buck: UB's Supercomputers Go 'Green'

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January 08, 2009

More Bang for Less Buck: UB's Supercomputers Go 'Green'

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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.

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