29 October 2008

CERN

Growing workloads and rising energy costs have made data centre energy efficiency a critical issue for many organizations, especially for those with older facilities that lack the power and thermal capacity needed to support growing needs.

The CERN computing centre was built over 35 years ago and, even after refurbishment, is only capable of providing 2.5 MW of electrical power and 2.5 MW of cooling capacity. Furthermore, CERN needs a very powerful computing infrastructure to handle the 10 - 15 Petabytes of data per year that are to be generated by its LHC experiments. Thus, in order to provide the maximum computing resources within this limit, CERN is using a variety of techniques and tools to achieve the best possible power efficiency.

Andreas Hirstius, Sverre Jarp and Andrzej Nowak authored last February a technical report giving an overview of CERN's approach to energy efficient computing, entitled 'Strategies for increasing data centre power efficiency'.

In this report, as part of the different techniques and tools presented, the authors highlighted how CERN benefitted from the move to multi-core processors with a more efficient architecture. Indeed the multi-core processors based on the Intel Core microarchitecture enabled CERN to provide five times more compute power within the same compute power per Watt than singlecore processors based on the earlier Netburst microarchitecture. Through the openlab, to maximize data centre performance per Watt, CERN and Intel also partnered on dynamic frequency control, virtualization and software optimization.

Intel recently published on its website an abstract of the report entitled 'Reducing Data Center Energy Consumption, A summary of strategies used by CERN, the world's largest physics laboratory' and a presentation on the following webpage.