United States.
The Massachusetts High Performance Green Computing Center (Mghpcc), its member universities, and the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts, have announced the launch of the Mass Net Zero (MassNZ) Data Center, an experimental, solar-powered micro data center that is the first of its kind in New England.
"Data centers play an indispensable role in our increasingly connected world, but they are voracious energy users. The MassNZ is a research practice and educational resource that will help us understand how to decrease the data center's energy footprint and improve its use of renewable energy in an era where we are trying to reduce dependence on fossil fuels," Mghpcc member Chancellor Kumble.
"There are three main obstacles to research in sustainable data center design: the availability of experimental infrastructure to enable realistic prototyping and evaluation, the availability of realistic use cases from a state-of-the-art green data center, and real-time visibility into the utility infrastructure that powers the data center. The MassNZ addresses all three."
The 200-square-foot MassNZ data center is adjacent to Mghpcc, a 15-megawatt (MW) LEED Certified Platinum data center. The solar panels located next to the micro installation provide energy. Within it are renewable cooling systems, as well as batteries and micro-flywheels for energy storage. MassNZ will also host a variety of different server, storage and networking systems.
MassNZ and MGHPCC will generate power, cooling, and workload data that will be used by researchers to investigate the integration of data centers with a smart grid; machine learning,data-driven modeling of sustainable data centers; and the design of high-performance computing applications that take advantage of new power management techniques. MassNZ is driving a number of research collaborations that aspire to utilize and expand its goals, in collaboration with Boston University, Northeastern University, and Williams College.
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