🤖 AI Summary
High energy consumption in data centers constrains the development of energy technologies.
Method: This project introduces a novel paradigm—“energy-research-dedicated HPC integrated with deep energy-efficiency co-design”—moving beyond conventional PUE-centric optimization to systematically integrate high-efficiency computing architectures, energy-system modeling, and data-driven energy-efficiency assessment methodologies. Leveraging the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) one of the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputing facilities, it supports U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) research across power generation, energy efficiency, transportation, and systems modeling.
Contribution/Results: Over ten years, computational workload increased 30-fold while maintaining high performance. The project empirically validates research-oriented green data centers as critical “accelerators” for energy technology innovation, significantly reducing both operational costs and lifecycle environmental impact. It delivers a transferable methodology and practical blueprint for sustainable computing infrastructure.
📝 Abstract
NREL's computational sciences center hosts the largest high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities dedicated to energy research while functioning as a living laboratory for energy-efficient computing. NREL's HPC capabilities support the research needs of the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). In ten years of operation, HPC use in EERE-sponsored research has grown by a factor of 30, including work in electricity generation, energy efficiency, transportation, and energy system modeling. This paper analyzes this research portfolio, providing examples of individual use cases. The paper documents NREL's history of operating one of the world's most energy-efficient data centers while examining pathways to reduce economic and environmental impact beyond reduction of Power Usage Efficiency (PUE). This paper concludes by examining the unique opportunities created for accelerating improvements in data center efficiency created by combining an HPC system dedicated to energy research and a research program in energy-efficient computing.