Category Archives: Green IT

New Green Server Competitor Emerging?

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There has been a decent amount of chatter on all the media channels over some of Facebook’s efforts to move forward with innovative technology. The other day I wrote about its new “green” European data center based in Sweden. In addition, at the recent Open Compute Project Summit, Facebook announced its intention to contribute to greater standardization at the system level for data center server and hardware equipment. For some, minimizing heat and energy consumption is as high a priority as performance.

A potential competitor to Facebook is emerging in HP, who is launching a new effort Project Moonshot. HP intends to utilize this program to develop:

…a new server development platform, “customer discovery lab” and partner ecosystem brought together with the purpose of reducing the complexity and energy consumption of environments that have thousands of servers along with all the network, storage, power, cooling and management technologies needed to support them.

But Facebook as a player in the world of enterprise IT is a newbie. Data centers are not their primary focus. So while HP may butt heads with them, their real game appears to be Intel.

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Facebook’s “Green” European Data Center

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Image Shot from one of Facebook's Data Centers

As power consumption eats away at the environment and company budgets, many organizations constantly look for ways that they can harness renewable energy to cut down costs and improve their image with regard to the environment.

Facebook’s first data center in Europe, based in Lulea, Sweden, is a good example of the possibilities of this: Continue reading →

Graph 500, Green500, HPCC, and SPEC: Alternative benchmarks for high-performance computing

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Image of Supermicro SuperRackSupercomputers have become a vital part of almost any innovative project undertaken by collaborative teams in the developed world. Server clusters can be found anywhere from the offices of small businesses to compartments in U.S. Navy submarines.

So which are the fastest supercomputers on earth? The usual measurement for high-performance computer (HPC) clusters is the TOP500 ranking, which is based on the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark. LINPACK stands for “linear equations software package”, and the benchmark measures how fast a supercomputer can solve a system of linear equations. The results are reported in units of billions of floating point operations per second (GFLOPS).

The high-performance LINPACK metric has long been the established standard for measuring computing performance, with intense competition worldwide for the lead spot in the TOP500. But some scientists criticize the TOP500 ranking for creating an incomplete picture of how to measure performance. The risk, as Mark Anderson describes in an article in IEEE Spectrum magazine, is motivating computer hardware manufacturers to develop less-effective technologies.

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China builds the world’s fastest supercomputer

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Photo of Tianhe-1A supercomputer courtesy of NVIDIA.comAfter almost a year-long run, the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has relinquished its title as the world’s fastest computer. This honor now belongs to the Tianhe-1A supercomputer located in the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China.

Tianhe-1A is expected to officially become the leader of the TOP500.org list of the world’s fastest supercomputers sometime in mid-November. It clocked an impressive 2.507 petaflops on the LINPACK scale, which is about the sum of the performance of supercomputers #6 to #10 on the Top 500 list, according to insideHPC. Jaguar, now the second most powerful supercomputer in the world, had a peak performance of about 1.75 petaflops.

Although Tianhe-1A may re-ignite the anxiety in the West that usually accompanies news of great achievements from East Asia, this is not the first time that America or Europe had lost the #1 place on the Top 500. In 2002, Japan captured the top spot with their Earth Simulator (ES) supercomputer, which remained the world’s fastest until September of 2004 when IBM’s Blue Gene/L cluster at Argonne National Laboratory surpassed it. The quasi-geopolitical competition for computing power is far from over, but China’s ascendancy is actually one of the less interesting things about Tianhe-1A.

Tianhe-1A can potentially usher in a new era in “personal supercomputing”. It is the first leader of the Top 500 to make extensive use of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). In fact, it is comprised of 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel CPUs. In comparison, Jaguar has 37,376 AMD CPUs and no GPUs.

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PUE can be a misleading energy-efficiency standard

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Photo of planet earthThe Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) standard is one of the leading benchmarks for measuring energy efficiency in a data center. But there are some situations where an energy-efficient change to a data center will actually register as more wasteful by the PUE. For this reason, it’s important to know the gaps in the PUE metric.

Winston Saunders has described just such a case on the Intel Server Room Blog in an article titled, “Turning the Tide: CIO’s dilemma with PUE”.

The dilemma, according to Saunders, is this: “If improving the efficiency of your data center is an important goal, should you incentive [sic] the organization to improve PUE?”

Taken as a goal in and of itself, the PUE may lead data center operators astray. Take this example discussed by Saunders. A data center is running old servers with processors from 2006 (e.g. Intel Xeon 5160). These processors consume more power and perform less calculations than processors that came out in 2010 (e.g. Intel Xeon 5670).

Here’s the problem: if that data center chose to upgrade their old and inefficient servers to newer systems running more efficient and higher-performing processors, the PUE metric of that data center would actually increase (meaning, that data center would be less efficient according to the PUE).

The reason why this would happen is because PUE compares how much energy is consumed by IT equipment in a data center compared to all other energy expenditures (for lighting, cooling the servers, and other infrastructure). So, the more of the total energy is used to power the servers and not the other systems, the better the PUE score and – in theory – the more efficient the data center.

Back to our example of the data center that upgraded its old servers. This data center’s new servers drain less power. This means that the IT portion of total energy consumption in the data center decreases, which means the PUE will register this hardware upgrade as less energy efficient. Of course, the truth of the matter is the exact opposite.

Saunders illustrates the importance of considering PUE in context very well in his article. Anyone responsible for controlling data center costs should consider this (and other) gaps in PUE when making truly energy-efficient decisions.

Cooling Servers Under Oil

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Photo courtesy of Matt Howard (http://www.flickr.com/people/35734278@N05) under the CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licenseMicheal Feldman of HPCwire has written an interesting article about a startup company called Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) that has a competitive and innovative product in the server cooling market.

GRC has developed a server rack that lies horizontally on the floor and is filled with an oil-based cooling fluid. Any server that is built according to the standard form factor can slide into the rack and be cooled by the oil bath.

Servers stored in a liquid solution? For this stroke of innovation (actually, the idea is not entirely new, as Feldman notes, but this is its most recent reiteration) GRC has been selected as one of the “Disruptive Technologies of the Year” for SC ’09 and SC ’10.

So how can servers live underwater (actually, under oil, since oil does not conduct electricity) safely? GRC can take any standard server (including blades and GPUs), remove its fans, and seal it with a special coating to make it safe for oil immersion. According to GRC, 250,000+ server hours of testing their racks has not revealed any malfunctions due to the cooling system.

So what are the advantages of this new kind of cooling system? As Feldman states: “The solution is advertised to reduce the cooling energy by 90 percent and cut overall power consumption in the datacenter by up to 45 percent. The pitch is that a single 10kW server rack at 8 cents per kWh will save over $5,000 per year on energy costs alone.”

Although at least one large supercomputing location (the Texas Advanced Computing Center) has begun using these server racks with happy results, GRC is having a difficult time partnering with server manufacturers to cover their servers under warranty if they are used in a GRC rack.

There are various liquid-cooling solutions on the market, but GRC’s is one of the most creative and cost-effective. It is indeed disruptive technology with lots of cost-savings potential. If GRC can overcome the stigma in the market against dunking servers into liquid, its technology can perhaps become a key player in the cooling industry.

Cashews, Datacenters and Imperial Pints

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Cloud BankWhen I was a kid, there was a t.v. show called Beyond 2000. It showcased cutting edge technology that was supposed to change the way we worked and lived. I guess, at the time, the siren song of the millennium still held its allure. Then we got American Idol and it all went downhill.

I remember one episode, in Beyond 2000, where they talked about containers made from processed rice. The containers could be molded into any shape, used and then consumed.

And by consumed, I mean eaten.

Genius!

Here was the solution to all of our landfill, waste disposal issues. Make stuff out of food then eat it. Those toy packages with the enraging twist ties and artery severing edges, just chew through them. On a shopping spree and need a little pick me up? Consolidate your loot and have a little snack.

Fast forward twenty years and everything old is new again. Discovery News reports NEC Corporation announced the development of a first-of-its kind biomass-based plastic produced from non-edible plant resources, such as cashew shells. The product is durable enough to use in electronic equipment and could, by 2013, be in production.

Plants have natural cooling properties and if these plastics retain some of that quality, they could add an inherent cooling mechanism, to alleviate the high energy costs of computer components.

It could also lead sysadmins to wonder why,  to paraphrase the sage Kramer, ‘these rack-servers are making me thirsty.’

PUE for data centers – updated measurement of energy efficiency

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On our sister blog, ServerProblemsSolved.com, I’ve published some thoughts about the updated data center efficiency metric called PUE, short for Power Usage Effectiveness. If you are responsible for a data center or are interested in green IT, make sure to read as well the white paper put out by the Green Grid that details the updates that have recently been made to how to calculate PUE.

Server rooms get hotter in Zurich

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IBM’s new data center offers bold new ideas about how to cool servers. It has long been taken for granted that the best way to control the temperature in a server room was to keep it as cool as possible by blowing out the heat generated by processors inside the servers with chassis fans. IBM’s new data center in Zurich, Switzerland uses liquid cooling to do the same job. In a previous post, I talked about liquid cooling as an alternative to air cooling, but the new data center in Zurich is unique: it’s cooled by hot, not cold, water.

As described in an article on ServerWatch.com, a new idea is emerging in the server industry about how to moderate the heat produced by running servers. Instead of controlling the temperature of the server room itself, it’s much more important to focus on cooling the server components, regardless of how high the temperatures rise in the server room. Recent innovations in air cooling, such as allowing air from outside the building to be cycled through the server room even in locations as hot as New Mexico, show that a hot server room by itself does not dampen the performance of the servers.

But CPUs overheating does. The new Zurich data center, unlike previous liquid-cooled clusters, uses water at 140 degrees F to cool CPUs that run at 185 degrees F. It’s not necessary to chill the water, IBM reasoned, because even warm water is much colder than the temperature of the processors that it heats. So, to save money, the Zurich data center does not chill the water, and moreover pumps it (once it’s been boiled by the servers) to help heat nearby homes.

According to EnterpriseITPlanet.com, “The combined carbon reduction from using less electricity to cool the servers to the recaptured heat for heating purposes is a whopping 85 percent.” As equally important, IBM saved about 40% on their energy spending by switching to hot-water cooling of their servers.

The bottom line, it seems to me, is summed up by Jed Scaramella, senior research analyst for IDC’s Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends as quoted in the ServerWatch article, when he said, “if you walk into the room and the room is cold, that doesn’t tell you much [about how well the servers are cooled]“.

Performance improvements and energy efficiency for HPC data centers

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Scientific Computing magazine’s latest Q&A article addresses a topic very important to most professionals who own or operate a data center: how to improve performance and save money on energy costs.

The magazine asked seven industry leaders in the HPC industry for their opinions about this subject. Their answers are very telling and reveal the state of data center technology today and the directions it will likely take in the near future.

Reducing the cost of power consumption

Perhaps the greatest expenditure facing data center operators today is in the electric bill they pay to keep their servers running. While HPC (high-performance computing) servers have become relatively cheaper in recent years with such innovations as GPUs (graphics processing unit), the price of powering ever-expanding data centers has only grown.

There are several bottlenecks that are contributing to these higher costs. The most common problem mentioned by the industry experts in the Q&A article is how to reduce the cost of the cooling systems in server rooms. As Bob Masson of Convey Computer noted, “Every watt required to power a server nominally requires a watt to cool it.”

For this reason, VP of HPC Consulting at NAG Andrew Jones recommends that data center operators make a long-run analysis before they buy new equipment. The price of a server isn’t just what you pay on the day you buy it. The cost also includes what it will take to power that server and cool it over time (and, if you’re buying dozens or hundreds of servers, this begins to add up significantly). That is the true cost of a server, and from this perspective, power and cooling specs become very important.

This kind of an analysis is not only useful before buying a server but also for evaluating an existing data center. Old equipment, as Blake Gonzalez of Dell HPC describes, can be so expensive to run due to power inefficiencies that some companies can save money by buying entirely new servers altogether. But before any such decisions can be made, Gonzalez notes, one has to be able to measure current power consumption accurately and know how to estimate the long-run cost of replacement servers before buying them.

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