Massachusetts Universities Plant Green Datacenter
Opening in November of 2012, the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) is a collaboration effort among five Massachusetts universities to build and run some good old-fashioned HPC applications, but at a lower cost to the environment.
To help understand how the MGHPCC earned its ‘G,’ Executive Director John Goodhue discussed with Green Computing Report the inception of a massive collaborative datacenter. The five research universities involved the project, which include Harvard, MIT, UMass, Boston University, and Northeastern University, all separately explored the idea of building a datacenter. According to Goodhue, they ended up running into each other constantly. Common sense took over from there.
“In 2009,” Goodhue said, “they decided they could get much better economies at scale if they pooled their resources and made one datacenter for five universities as opposed to five different ones.”
Holyoke was a dream location for the center for a couple of reasons, the first being that it was close enough to each of the five universities that they could access HPC applications on a cloud basis. The second somewhat unusual reason laid the groundwork for the center to become a harbinger of green IT.
“A neat attribute of the city of Holyoke is that more than 75% of its power comes from a hydro-facility that was built on the Connecticut river back in the 1850s to power a bunch of textile mills but it’s stayed there ever since and supplies most of the power to the community and therefore this facility,” said Goodhue. As a result, the electricity the facility buys from the city of Holyoke leaves a much less significant carbon footprint.
From those beginnings, the developers of the facility continued to focus on reducing carbon emissions and increasing power efficiency. “That was really the origin of the name Green computing center and it set us off down a path where we’ve paid a lot of attention to both the environmental footprint as well as power consumption,” Goodhue continued.
Massachusetts and the Holyoke area are in a somewhat unique position relative to the rest of the United States regarding building and maintaining a green HPC center. For one, the high concentration of research institutions, such as the five supporting the project, creates an environment conducive to the shared interests in building a high-tech institution.
Of course, the area isn’t the sole region in the country with a high research density. What separates Holyoke from Southern California or the Research Triangle in North Carolina can be attributed to something as simple as weather. Massachusetts obviously enjoys cooler winters than their more southern comrades, allowing the facility to cool its machines with outside air a good portion of the time. “We’re able to use outside air 70% percent of the time or more to cool our chilled water as opposed to using chillers.”
As anyone who has to pay electric bills or has studied chemistry, changing the temperature of water is an expensive endeavor. Eschewing that in favor of simply opening up the doors and letting the high-velocity molecules rush out into the air would significantly reduce costs and carbon emissions.
Holyoke also happens to sit in a fiber hotspot, allowing communications between the universities and the facility to be fast enough to facilitate HPC applications. “In selecting the site, obviously power and communications were the two most important criteria along with availability of the land. They settled on Holyoke, Massachusetts for a couple of reasons. It turns out it has the lowest power rates in the state. Another important technical consideration is that it sits at a fiber crossroad.”
Further, Massachusetts benefits from a political advantage that Goodhue traces to the research traditions of the state. “For the last two centuries, the state of Massachusetts’s economy has been driven by ideas and innovation so the state government has a very strong interest in the strength of the research of public universities like these five,” said Goodhue in extolling the state’s history, which he believes enables the state government to pour money into research facilities like this. “So they were actually very encouraging of this project and in fact invested some grant money to help get it going.”
Goodhue noted that MGHPCC aims to have a PUE of around 1.2, well below the average (a good thing) for facilities that size (the MGHPCC runs on 10 MW). Along with using the environment to partially cool the machines, they allow the temperatures to rise above the typical 20 degrees Celsius, believing that the computers will function above that level. Further, the techniques they use, such as bringing the water cooling process closer to the computer, may also impact that low PUE.
“We had a balance between compromising and getting the last little bit of efficiency out and making sure that we stayed flexible with respect to the kind of systems that we could bring in, just because HPC is evolving quickly and always has,” noted Goodhue while discussing the challenges of efficiently cooling an HOC system. “So for example we’ve brought water cooling to the computer and kept operating temperatures relatively high in ranges that allow us to accommodate high-power density systems.”
With that being said, the facility only opened in November of 2012, so their track record is not extensive. But while it remains to be seen whether these measures will be effective, the principle is sound.
Like any other HPC facility, the center will be focused on research modeling astrophysical phenomena or proteomics. However, there will also be a few projects devoted to green applications, according to Goodhue. One of those is a meta-analysis of in-house data, where the universities will collect data from the myriad sensors placed around the facility and use the HPC machines to compute and analyze that data.
“There are literally thousands of sensors that captures data on how to run the building efficiently. We’ll be taking that data and putting it into a database that we’ll make available to the people studying energy efficiency in building design as a living example of how this complicated facility works.”
Goodhue hopes the MGHPCC can become a model for others building green HPC centers. Indeed, he noted that they intend to be collaborative, contributing as much to the green IT community as it has contributed to the building of their facility.
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