Issue 14, February/March
FOCUS IN PRACTICE
(a)
(b)
GBB conservatory
(c) ~1’ Divider Fan, 2 Fan, 1
Divider Duct work EOC container Inlet
Figure 1: (a) Layout of the prototype EOC container integrated into the conservatory facility; (b) Photograph of the Green Cloud prototype at the conservatory; (c) Schematic of prototype EOC container
heat generated by the data center is vented into the greenhouse, saving both cooling costs for the data center and heating costs for the greenhouse. During hot weather, heat production and delivery is balanced by services migration.
Fully integrated into the general access, the Notre Dame Condor pool appears no different from other resources to end-user jobs. The differentiating factor lies in the facility integration and environmentally aware controls system set in place for job management and scheduling.
The controls system currently has two primary components: Condor and xCAT. The Condor component handles the entire scientifi c workload management and each server’s response to the workload based on environment, such as system temperature.
The xCAT handles real-time system vitals monitoring through interface with the hardware’s service processor baseboard management
controller (BMC) and
intelligent platform management interface (IPMI). The interface between the two is a Python-based, open-source central manager.
GOING BEYOND GREEN
The green cloud (Figure 1) was designed with a chief target to minimize cost while providing a suitably secure (low visibility) facility for use outdoors in a publicly accessible venue.
Figure 2 (a)
100 110 120
50 60 70 80 90
00:00 06:00 12:00 18:00 Tout,2 Tout,1 THA THPC TCA Tin
3.5 4
2.5 3
Time of Day 00:00 06:00 12:00 18:00 00:00 00:00 2 06:00 12:00 18:00 Time of Day 00:00 06:00 12:00 18:00
Contrary to the standard provision of a theoretical upper bound, we provided a measured lower bound to demonstrate the potential for economic and environmental benefi t in adverse conditions.
Figure 2 (b) 4.5x 104
20 30 40 50 60 70
10 00:00 Figure 2: (a) Representative measured temperatures; (b) Available waste heat over a 48 hour period in July 2010
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The container-based solution is a standard 20ft x 8ft retrofi tted cargo container with the following additions: 40kW capacity power panel with 208V power supplies to each rack, lighting, internally insulated walls, man door access, ventilation louvers, small fans and duct work connecting the Sustainable Distributed Data Center to the greenhouse – costing US$20,000 in total.
the data center and heating costs for the greenhouse
During cold weather, the heat generated by the data center is vented into the greenhouse, saving both cooling costs for
Exterior power infrastructure, which includes the transformer, underground conduit, panel and meter, were coordinated by AEP (a local electricity supplier) and the City of South Bend, which also provided the slab foundation.
The high-bandwidth network connectivity critical to viable scaling is possible via 1Gb fi ber network connectivity to the Notre Dame campus on the St Joe County MetroNet backbone.
Figure 2 shows the amount of heat recovery for a 48-hour period during July. On average, almost 33.3 × 103 Btu/hr (9.75kW) was extracted from the data servers for this period of time for a total energy recovery of 1.60 × 106 Btu (468kWh).
Given an average input power to the prototype in July of 12.1kW, the inexpensive prototype was capable of capturing 80% of the available energy.
The prototype container has the capacity to operate at a nearly constant heat recovery of 102,364Btu (30kW), corresponding to
a 15% savings in monthly
consumption during the winter. The installation
energy of additional and next-
generation containers will provide near linear increases to the total savings accordingly.
Return
Paul R Brenner PhD, PE is the associate director at the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing. He holds a BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering. He is a registered professional engineer in the state of Ohio and member of the ASHRAE and ACM professional organizations.
Brenner’s research in ICT thermal energy re-utilization won the Uptime Institute’s 2009 Green IT award. He has worked on data center design for the US and Allied forces in Afghanistan and consults on next generation facility requirements for the US Air Force Research
Labs DoD Supercomputing Resource Center.
Temperature (ϒF)
qwaste (Btu/hr)
Servers On
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