Research links data centers, renewables
The project aims to find alternatives to dealing with the growing power consumption needs of large data centers. Often large data centers are located near traditional power plants to make sure they can get an adequate supply of electricity.
"Power is expensive and it’s becoming a constraint on data services, so we need to avert the industry from a collision point," said Steven Kester, director of government relations and regulatory affairs at AMD.
\Researchers will study the feasibility of sharing workloads among portable data centers packed in shipping containers and based at various solar and wind farms. Their work may identify new ways of combining data and renewable energy services.
"There may be a new cost model here if a utility or a solar or wind farm operator through co-location of one of these portable data centers can export not just energy but data services as well," said Kester. Such a hybrid business model also could help bring broadband services to rural areas where solar and wind farms are often located, he added.
For several years computer makers have been selling complex sets of servers and switches packed in shipping containers as modular building blocks of data centers. To date, no one has tried locating such containers at geographically dispersed renewable energy plants.
The study will address the fact that solar and wind farms only generate power intermittently. So researchers will explore the economics of sharing jobs among different renewable energy farms linked by fibre optic networks.
In the first 12-18 months of the study, researchers will characterize on paper the trade offs of power and networking costs of such a scheme. In a subsequent phase they will test out the concepts by locating portable data centers built by HP at multiple renewable-energy generation stations.
The group aims to discover new models that will lower costs, energy use and carbon footprint. The work may include developing software to help manage such large distributed networks.
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