Zero-Emission Datacenters: Concept and First Steps

Date: Monday, March 16, 2009
Time: 10:30am - 11:30am
Location: LBNL Bldg. 54, Room 130 (Pers Hall Conference Room)

Speaker:
Bruno Michel
Advanced Thermal Packaging
IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland

Abstract:
High-performance liquid cooling allows datacenter operation with
coolant temperatures above the free cooling limit in all climates,
eliminating the need for chillers and allowing the thermal energy to
be re-used in cold climates. We have demonstrated removal of 85% of
the heat load from high performance compute nodes at a temperature
of 60ºC and compare their energy and emission balance with a
classical air cooled datacenter, a datacenter with free cooling in a
cold climate zone, and a datacenter with chiller mediated energy
re-use. We show that our concept reduces the energy consumption by
almost a factor of two compared to a current datacenter and reduces
the carbon footprint by an even larger factor. Our energy re-use
concept can be demonstrated most effectively in terms of cost and
energy savings in a homogeneous high performance computing environment.

This is joint work with T. Brunschwiler, B. Smith, and E. Ruetsche.

Host of Seminar:
Horst Simon