RICHLAND, WASH.– Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is putting its shoulder to the wheel in the effort to reduce data center energy consumption. The Dept. of Energy’s high performance computing lab has launched a program to measure the effectiveness and possible energy savings that would come from liquid cooling in the data center. The lab will focus on a liquid cooling spray technology, developed by Liberty Lake, Wash.-based ISR, SprayCool.

PNNL will run the experiment on an eight rack system, a 14 teraflop peak, 9 sustained teraflop computer in a very small space — 800 square feet. The computer won’t just sit there — it will run codes, mainly computational fluid dynamics, measuring performance, temperature of the processors, overall room temperature.

According to Dr. Moe A. Khaleel, Director, Computational Sciences and Mathematics Division at PNNL, the lab will be able to conduct “what-if” experiments, like turning off the room’s air conditioning to see what happens to the room temperature and the temperature of the processor.

In addition to measuring the effectiveness of liquid cooling in high density environments, the study will also measure performance per watt. The facility is outfitted to meter the electrical input on the room.

“We’ll be able to see how much energy savings you can have if there are any, over air cooling. We’ll report on it nationally and will publish results month by month,” Khaleel said. “This is a national lab, we have to serve the national mission. Energy efficiency of data centers is one of the things we need to be doing. We believe the results will be positive, but we want to quantify things.”

PNNL’s first liquid cooling report will come out in June or July.