HPC Services staff member Yong Qin was part of a panel, along with other Berkeley Lab scientists from the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, at the Silicon Valley Data Center Efficiency Summit 2012 last week in San Jose talking about Berkeley Lab's recently released study to understand the feasibility of implementing Demand Response and control strategies in Data Centers. Yong discussed the issues and our experiences related to reducing or geographically shifting computational workload to a remote data center as a response to a demand to lower electrical usage.

In another session, IT Division Infrastructure group lead Ed Ritenour presented our work with SynapeSense to convert our CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning) cooling units to use sensor driven VFD (Variable Frequency Drives) to automatically adjust the cooling in the Data Center to meet cooling demands and save power.