The Energy Systems Integration Facility continues to receive awards for design, planning, construction, and efficiency. Highlights of recent awards are provided below.
The one-of-a-kind Energy Systems Integration Facility has been lauded for its unique approach to sustainable design—which includes the most energy-efficient data center in the world.
The Energy Systems Integration Facility was recognized as R&D Magazine's 2014 Laboratory of the Year for being a first-of-its-kind research user facility that uniquely merges three specialized components: (1) an ultra-energy-efficient workplace that consumes 74% less energy than the national average for office buildings, (2) one of the world's most energy-efficient high-performance computing data centers, and (3) sophisticated high-bay laboratory spaces with outdoor test areas.
The ultra-efficient high-performance computing platform at the Energy Systems Integration Facility was named a top-100 technology breakthrough of 2014. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard, won the award for the HP Apollo 8000 liquid-cooled supercomputing platform. This innovative system uses novel component-level warm-water cooling to dissipate heat generated by the supercomputer, thus eliminating the need for expensive and inefficient chillers in the data center.
The Energy System Integration Facility's ultra-efficient data center helped the National Renewable Energy Laboratory earn a 2013 U.S. Department of Energy Sustainability Award and the 2013 InfoWorld Green 15 IT Award. The high-performance computing data center is the world's most energy-efficient, with annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.06. The high-performance computing data center features warm-water liquid cooling for its high-power computer components. Through this novel, ground-breaking approach, 90% of computer waste heat is captured and reused as the primary heat source for the facility's offices and laboratory space.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and its partner Asetek received the HPCwire Editor's Choice Award for the Best Application of Green Computing for Asetek's liquid-cooling data center retrofit at the Energy Systems Integration Facility. Aspen Systems installed the Asetek RackCDU liquid-cooling system as a retrofit to an air-cooled Aspen high-performance computing cluster. The innovative hot water, direct-to-chip, data center liquid-cooling technology removes heat from processing units, memory modules, and other hot spots within the servers with an all-liquid path and rejects it into ambient outdoor air without chilling. This enables cooling savings in excess of 50%, density increases of 2.5x to 5x, and recovery of all the server energy removed for reuse in facility heating and cooling.
The Energy Systems Integration Facility project team was recognized by the secretary of energy for successfully delivering the first facility that can conduct integrated research and development of the nation's electrical distribution grid at the megawatt level.
