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UB’s supercomputers going ‘green’
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An upgrade to CCR will realize significant energy savings while boosting the center’s total capacity.
In the world of supercomputers, practical considerations like energy consumption traditionally have been overshadowed by the emphasis on high performance. But as energy costs have increased, computational scientists at UB’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 via 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 data centers 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,” says Thomas Furlani, director of CCR and principal investigator on the NYSERDA contract. Matt Jones, CCR lead computational scientist, is co-principal investigator.
“Over the next year, CCR 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.
The project will replace a minimum of 256 of CCR’s existing high-performance computing servers with high-efficiency models that not only conserve a significant amount of power and cooling, but also expand the scientific, engineering and industrial outreach capabilities of the center.
Furlani noted that this is welcome news for the researchers currently utilizing CCR because the center’s computing resources are typically heavily oversubscribed. He added that this increased computing capacity will allow scientists and engineers from UB, Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute to carry out state-of-the-art research in such areas as medicine, genomics, proteomics, chemistry, molecular structure determination, aerospace engineering, combustion modeling, medical informatics and chemical engineering.
“Access to the advanced computing infrastructure will not only have a significant impact on science in Western New York, but also will result in increased federal funding to support this research,” he said. “To date, more than $50 million in external federal funding has been awarded to UB and Western New York scientists carrying out research utilizing CCR’s resources. These research dollars have a significant economic impact in our region.”
CCR staff and the scientists who use the center work closely with the UB 2020 strategic strength in Information and Computing Technology.
The center’s expanded computing power also will result in significant economic development in Western New York by providing its industrial partners with a competitive advantage they could not otherwise afford to maintain on their own.
Currently, CCR partners with a diverse range of companies in the region, providing them with access to the center’s state-of-the-art computing and visualization facilities.
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