The Energy Department bestowed a Sustainability Award on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the lab's effort to conserve energy and reduce costs by consolidating data centers.
The lab began the program in 2011, using its High Performance Computing Strategic Facility Plan as a guide. So far it has shut down 26 data centers, comprising 26,000 square feet of space. The resulting savings totals nearly $350,000 annually — $305,000 in energy bills and $43,000 in maintenance costs.
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"Our institutional HPC needs will grow in the future and it is important for the Lab to have a Data Center Sustainability Plan to ensure we manage our computing resources in an efficient and cost effective way," said Anna Maria Bailey, LLNL's HPC Facilities manager and an organizer of the annual Energy Efficient Working Group workshop conducted at the Supercomputing Conference.
Shutting down data centers also eliminates the need to install and maintain the electrical meters that DOE requires to monitor power usage across the institution. That alone has resulted in cost avoidance of more than $10 million. DOE had required that all LLNL data centers be metered by fiscal 2015.
