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Green IT at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre
Rising energy costs and the need for environmental sustainability make energy efficiency an important topic in data center operations. “Green IT” stands for all efforts related to improving energy efficiency in data centers.
At Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Green IT has been an important topic for many years and has evolved into one of LRZ’s central research fields. In addition to the compute, network, and storage components, the energy efficiency of the cooling and air conditioning systems contribute significantly to the overall energy consumption in a data center. Therefore, LRZ has developed the Four Pillar Model as a holistic methodology for optimizing the energy efficiency of the entire data center infrastructure.
LRZ is actively involved in research activities surrounding energy efficient IT hardware, energy efficient data center infrastructures, energy efficient system management software, and energy efficient applications. In 2012, LRZ was awarded the German Data Centre Award for energy and resource efficient data centers.
The Four Pillar Model for Energy Efficient Data Center Operations
⤷ Building Infrastructure
- Reduction of losses in the power supply chain
- Improved technologies for cooling
- Reuse of waste heat
⤷ Hardware
- Latest semiconductor technology
- Power saving mechanisms of today’s CPUs
- Compute accelerators
⤷ Management Software
- Monitoring of power consumption in IT and building infrastructures
- Virtualisation
- Smart control of hardware power saving modes
⤷ Applications
- Efficient algorithms
- Optimized libraries
- Efficient programming paradigms