US DOE – Technology Changes, but Energy Efficiency Principles Remain Steadfast in Data Center Design
FEMP’s data center design guide updates focus on the new or improved technologies that have emerged since 2011. With these innovations come greater energy and water demands—and increased need to make data centers of all kinds more efficient.
Data centers are the heartbeat that keep a flow of information pumping through our public and private sectors. To process a mind-boggling amount of data in mere seconds—and keep cool while doing it—data centers consume massive amounts of energy. And as our demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning grows, so too will the energy demands placed on data centers.
Figuring out how to keep pace with these energy demands in an efficient and sustainable way is where the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) leads the way. DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is dedicated to energy efficiency and renewable energy research and development. So, FEMP turned to NREL to develop a guide that Federal agencies can follow to optimize energy and water usage in their data centers.
NREL researchers David Sickinger and Otto Van Geet applied their combined data center design and operations knowledge and experience to update FEMP’s Best Practices Guide for Energy-Efficient Data Center Design with input from Magnus Herrlin at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The updated guide applies to traditional air-cooled data centers, Sickinger said :
All the way up to the cutting-edge data centers that have higher rack power densities and use liquid cooling,
The U.S. Department of Defense’s Unified Facilities Criteria references the original version of the guide,
Van Geet, said:
And it has made a dramatic difference for how they build and operate their data centers,
But Federal agencies aren’t the only ones who can benefit from the guide.
Van Geet, said:
The private sector has data centers and can use this guide too – hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, plus universities, the healthcare and banking industries, for example,
Best practices are more appropriate than a uniform mandate because there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for efficient data center design. A data center in the desert will have different design temperature parameters than a data center a mile above sea level, for example. The guide provides specific efficiency metrics and their calculations, along with benchmarking targets and additional resources to reference for different circumstances.
As a former facility engineer and master planner, FEMP Energy Program Manager Kendall Kam is,
A firm believer in guides like these. Data centers are expensive, so whether you’re in the process of building or renovating one, if you can plan for energy- and water-use efficiencies in advance, you can get the most bang for your buck.
According to the guide, the main priority is to optimize a data center’s energy usage by making its internal systems as energy efficient as possible (measured as power usage effectiveness). The guide expands on sections focused on how to improve efficiencies for IT equipment, electrical systems, and air-cooling and liquid-cooling systems. The second priority is to reuse as much waste heat as possible (measured as energy reuse effectiveness) and then reject unusable waste heat through dry coolers when possible to save water (measured as water usage effectiveness). Finally, maximize the use of energy drawn from renewable systems on-site or within the grid region (measured as carbon usage effectiveness).
“Across the board—from the compute side to the facility side—data center technologies have changed dramatically since 2011,” said Van Geet, a mechanical engineering researcher. But the energy-saving principles reflected in the 2011 version of the best practices guide are still applicable today.
Sickinger said, a high-performance computing researcher.
We just needed to modernize it, especially with the increasing rack compute densities, which was one of the big triggers for the update,
“And things that were just emerging in 2011, like warm-water liquid cooling, for example, we have a lot more detail on that now.”
Methods for heat reuse have been a hot topic industrywide—one the authors prioritized.
Sickinger said,
Europe is way ahead on heat reuse from data centers, but we are seeing a very increased interest in that area,
“Otto Van Geet and I are involved in an Open Compute Project heat reuse group.”
And though the guide does not do a deep dive into organizational structure and operations, the authors do Sickinger said,
Prompt people to think about what the business justifications may be for keeping something on-premises versus moving it to the cloud,
The burgeoning use of AI is on the authors’ radar too.
Van Geet, said:
AI is influencing the load growth for data centers, so energy and water usage is rapidly growing too. A data center that is using AI works a lot like NREL’s high-performance computing data center,
NREL’s data center was efficiently designed to dedicate only 6% of its energy consumption to equipment cooling (a typical data center requires 70% to perform that task).
Sickinger, said:
We’re looking at the next generation of cooling technology for data centers, thinking about how to handle the ever-climbing rack power densities and their processing power,
The authors are exploring these critical cooling technology questions as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) COOLERCHIPS program.
Sickinger and Van Geet credit their continual participation in DOE-funded technical assistance projects, collaborative projects with other national labs, and working groups to stay abreast of the latest industry challenges and solutions. And they’re looking forward to the conversations this updated guide will inspire.
Kam agrees, and he hopes data center stakeholders will feel inspired to reach out to FEMP.
Kam said,
We have a lot of resources for them, and this guide is just one piece of the whole.
Ultimately, he would like to see these products serve as a launching point for professional connections.
I would love to see a cohort of data center managers get together so they can compare notes. I think sometimes people in the data center world feel like they’re a lone wolf, and I want them to know they’re not alone,
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US DOE – Technology Changes, but Energy Efficiency Principles Remain Steadfast in Data Center Design, source
