scope:

INTRODUCTION

A new supercomputer facility at the University of California - the Computational Research and Theory Facility (CRTF) was designed to incorporate energy efficiency strategies while providing flexibility for a wide range of supercomputer cooling strategies. One of the primary goals of this facility was to provide a design that not only demonstrated world-class computational ability but also demonstrated best practices and novel solutions to the energy use of high performance computers. This one building, with office space, computer room, and infrastructure is expected to more than double the energy use for the campus that it is associated with. An arbitrary power budget of 7.5 MW for the initial buildout and 17 MW for the ultimate buildout was established by management decision. Since the computing sciences group that will occupy the building is judged on computational output, there was strong incentive to maximize the amount of energy available for computational work and to minimize the infrastructure loading.

As a result, a design target for data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) was established. This established the ratio of IT energy to energy use of the total facility at 0.83. (Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) - the inverse of DCiE - target = 1.2). With this goal, the design team was challenged to seek out and implement best practices and push the limits of existing technologies. As can be seen in Figure 1, this would clearly place this center above the centers previously benchmarked by LBNL. While the design is not finalized, DCiE for peak power is predicted to be in the range of 0.83-0.90, and the DCiE for energy is predicted to be in the range of 0.90-0.95.