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10: Green IT Case Studies for Universities and a Large Company 165

Average Data Center Power Allocation

Other
10%

HVAC Cooling
Servers
22% 46%

HVAC Fans/CRACS1
8%

Lighting UPS DC Equipment 3% ptg
3% 8%
Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL)

Figure 10.1 Average power allocation for 12 benchmarked data centers (LBNL 2007)

High Performance Computing (HPC) at a Large Research
University
This area of the Columbia University green IT plan is especially interest-
ing to me. For my Ph.D. thesis at U.C. Berkeley, the HPC facilities at U.C.
Berkeley and LBNL were available for the Monte Carlo simulations I used to
determine mechanical failure probabilities under random vibration. (My
studies were based on airplane sonic boom signatures.) At that time, I never
considered the electric power required to perform those intense computa-
tions! As pointed out by the Columbia University IT team, in the past sev-
eral years, HPC has been growing at every research university, government
research laboratory, and high-tech industry, nationally and internationally.
HPC is a cornerstone of almost all scientific research disciplines, many of
which had previously used little or no computing resources. Researchers
are now performing simulations, analyzing experimental data from sources
such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, genetic sequencers, scanning-
tunneling electron microscopes, econometric and population data, and so on.