The University at Buffalo is upgrading its supercomputers to a more environmentally-friendly model, saving money and increasing power in the process.
According to Thomas Furlani, director of UB's Center for Computational Research (CCR), the university will save $150,000 in energy costs per semester.
"The university has generously provided $150,000 for the upgrade and so they will recoup their investment in the first year and see an energy savings of $150,000 per year," Furlani said.
The CCR will utilize computers with new multi-core processors to use less energy while increasing the amount of operations the computer can perform per second.
"Right now we can do 13 trillion operations per second," Furlani said. "When we carry out this latest upgrade we'll increase that by 50 percent to 20 trillion operations per second."
Despite this increase in speed, the new supercomputers will use less energy by utilizing low-voltage processors.
"There are two types of processors you can get-ones that are low voltage and ones that are normal voltage," Furlani said. "It turns out you have a 10 percent performance hit with the low voltage ones. In terms of cost savings and energy savings, it's well worth it."
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) provided UB with an additional $300,000 contract to upgrade the supercomputers to a greener model.
"Part of their mission is to... promote energy conservation, and data centers have become a huge energy drain and cost," Furlani said.
According to Furlani, NYSERDA mainly offers these contracts for education and outreach purposes.
"They want to inform the public and inform other businesses that rather than maintain old processors that are three or four years old, it's actually more cost effective in large data centers to replace them with new low-voltage processors," Furlani said. "They're trying to sell energy conservation as not only a good thing to do for the environment, but also a good thing to do business-wise because it's cost effective."
According to Furlani, the CCR is currently testing out different models and has not yet made a final decision about which to purchase.
"Right now we're doing benchmarking studies... we're measuring the energy input and output and comparing them to our current processors," Furlani said. "We hope to upgrade sometime this semester."
Furlani expressed astonishment over how much computers improve every year.
"A computer developed to crack codes during World War II filled up a whole room with 17,000 vacuum tubes and completed 200 operations every second," Furlani said. "Processors in a laptop today can do 2 billion operations every second."
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
