Data Center Goes to DC (Direct Current not the US Capital)

Yesterday, a consortium of researchers from the public and private sectors embarked on a real-world experiment to gauge whether large computing facilities can operate on less power if they cut alternating current (AC) out of the equation.

At the University of California, San Diego, engineers switched a set of servers in a campus data center to operate continuously on 380-volt direct current (DC) – as part of a project that allows researchers to track in great detail the energy savings that servers and data centers can hope to achieve through a variety of architectural and procedural efficiencies, including the use of DC power.

The experiment at UC San Diego is part of Project GreenLight, a National Science Foundation-funded initiative that has deployed a modular data center on campus with sensors and other instruments to measure the energy efficiency of information and communication technologies – and to help researchers build greener IT systems and software.

“The UC San Diego campus has made substantial investments for energy savings,” said Thomas A. DeFanti, principal investigator on Project GreenLight and a senior research scientist in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). “The switch to DC powering of servers holds great potential on a campus where supercomputers and other high-tech facilities represent a disproportionately large share of energy consumption."

It is estimated that companies could save billions of dollars each year in capital costs and ongoing energy savings by using all-DC distribution in their data centers.

“The coupling of renewable energy systems that generate DC power with large consumers of DC is the wave of the future for energy efficiency,” said Byron Washom, director of strategic energy initiatives at UC San Diego. “Our contracted 2.8 MW fuel cell that utilizes renewable methane gas will only occupy the land area of a tennis court, yet it produces more DC power than that required by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.”

Read the full story on the Calit2 Web site.

Check out the Calit2 Flikr photo stream.

Above photo caption: UCSD electrical technician flips the final switch on the GreenLight Instrument to convert two of its racks to DC-DC power.

Glove Box in a NanoEngineering Lab

There is a glove box in Shirley Meng's NanoEngineering Lab at UC San Diego, but it's not the kind of glove box that stores gloves. Instead, you have stick your hands and arms through enormous black gloves in order to touch anything that is in the box. And once your black-gloved hands are in the box, you have to put on ANOTHER pair of gloves before you can do any work. Below are a couple of photos of students from the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion. More photos on Flikr, at the Shirley Meng set...photos that accompany the story about the new NASA contract to Meng and NEI Corp.

Science Blogging Aggregator

Like science blogs? Check out the new http://scienceblogging.org/

Pedestrian Remover in ScienceNews

Last Friday, ScienceNews covered the Pedestrian Remover story.

I liked the final quote from computer science professor Serge Belongie:

“The project is a nice combination of computer science and social awareness,” he says. “All too often, computer scientists implement something just because it is cool rather than there being a need.”

Read the full story by Rachel Ehrenberg on the ScienceNews site: "Protecting innocent — and not so innocent — bystanders "

Largest Earthquake Simulation: Go SDSC!

SDSC Leads Supercomputing Efforts in Creating Largest-Ever Earthquake Simulation

Magnitude 8.0 Simulation, Named a Gordon Bell Prize Finalist, Could Guide Emergency Planning

Seismologists have long been asking not if, but when ‘The Big One’ will strike southern California. Just how big will it be, and how will the amount of shaking vary throughout the region? Now we may be much closer to finding out the answer to at least the latter part of that question, and help prepare the Golden State’s emergency response teams to better cope with such a potential disaster.

Check out the earthquke simulation video on Scivee.tv

Read the full story on the SDSC news site.

Check out the UT story by Gary Robbins. (Includes embedded version of the quake simulation).

Surfing with Onboard Computer in Wired

Wired.com embedded one of the two surfingYouTube videos I made for this story.

Check out the videos and full story here.

Software for Efficient Computing in the Age of Nanoscale Devices

San Diego, CA, August 19, 2010 -- As semiconductor manufacturers build ever smaller components, circuits and chips at the nano scale become less reliable and more expensive to produce. The variability in their behavior from device to device and over their lifetimes – due to manufacturing, aging-related wear-out, and varying operating environments – is largely ignored by today’s mainstream computer systems.
Now a visionary team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from six universities is proposing to deal with the downside of nanoscale computer components by re-thinking and enhancing the role that software can play in a new class of computing machines that are adaptive and highly energy efficient.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today awarded a $10 million, five-year grant to researchers who will explore “Variability-Aware Software for Efficient Computing with Nanoscale Devices.” The grant is part of the funding agency’s Expeditions in Computing program, which rewards far-reaching agendas that “promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society.”

Read more of this Calit2 story written by Doug Ramsey.

Variability Expedition at Variability.org

Researchers on the team include: Rajesh Gupta, Ranjit Jhala, Sorin Lerner, Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steve Swanson and Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou from UC San Diego; Lara Dolecek and Puneet Gupta from UCLA Engineering; Subhasish Mitra from Stanford; Dennis Sylvester from Michigan; Rakesh Kumar from UIUC’s Coordinated Science Laboratory; as well as Nikil Dutt and Alex Nicolau from UCI’s Center for Embedded Computer Systems.