Joint Projects
The Green Grid and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy are working together to support a variety of activities, which aim to assist data center facilities in initiating and implementing an energy management program, to adopt clean energy and efficiency technologies and to achieve continual efficiency improvements.
Data Center Energy Profiler
The DOE has developed an online software tool called Data Center Energy Profiler, or DC Pro, which is designed to help owners quickly "diagnose" how energy is being used by their data centers and how they might save energy and money. The Profiler is a first step to identifying potential savings and reducing environmental emissions associated with energy production and use. DC Pro output includes a customized printable report showing the details of energy purchases for their data center(s), how energy is consumed by their data center(s), potential energy cost savings, comparison of their data center energy utilization versus other data centers using the DCiE metric, and a list of next steps that they can follow to start saving energy.
The Green Grid is assisting with this effort by developing a list of questions and answers regarding IT equipment within the data center. The questions and answers will be used by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to develop and enhance the IT Systems Module for future versions of the DC Pro tool. Also, eleven individual Green Grid members have volunteered to test DC Pro with actual data center performance data and give DOE feedback on areas of improvement.
Pacific Northwest National Labs Data Collection Project
Data Center Test Bed Facility
Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL), with funding from the Department of Energy (NNSA), has built an Energy Smart Data Center Test Bed Facility (ESDC-TBF). The facility is a data center housed in a much larger mixed-use facility called the Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab (EMSL). At the heart of the ESDC is a liquid-cooled (spray cooled) and energy efficient IBM cluster that is highly instrumented for temperature, air flow, power, water flow, and other measurements. In addition, the remainder of the EMSL is instrumented in order to measure all sources of power consumption by subsystems that support the powering and cooling of the ESDC. As part of the research, PNNL has developed a software tool called Fundamental Research in Efficient Datacenters (FRED). The purpose of FRED is to communicate with, and collect data from, all the disparate subsystems used in the mixed-use facility in support of the ESDC (communication protocols issues have been dealt with via FRED). FRED is used to quantify, at a minimum, the total power consumption within EMSL that is attributable to the IT Equipment as well as the entire ESDC (considered the facility). This data is used to calculate the real-time DCiE of the ESDC under varying conditions.
Data Center Energy Productivity (DCeP)
The objective of this effort is to carry out an initial investigation into the ability of The Green Grid’s proposed DCeP metric to effectively quantify the useful work produced by a specified set of computing resources relative to the amount of energy consumed by said resources to produce this work. The results from the initial testing will be used to refine the proposed metric. The objective for this study is not to provide an absolute assessment of the computational energy productivity of any specific computing installation. Nor is it intended, at this stage of its development, to provide a means of comparing this attribute in one data center or configuration of equipment to another. Such studies could be undertaken in the future once this new metric has proven to be meaningful and repeatable. The research is being conducted using real-life scientific code developed by PNNL. The code is being run on the highly instrumented NW-ICE cluster, housed in PNNL’s ESDC.
Peer Review of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Study Project
In early 2007, LBNL posted results of a direct current (DC) demonstration project, which operated from June to August of 2006. In response, The Green Grid conducted a peer review of the study, providing a critical review of the results as well as a discussion of next steps in the evaluation of this and other power distribution topologies. For more information, this white paper is available for download.