Columbia University
IN-1: Innovation 1

Columbia has implemented a Green Data Center program with support from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA contract ST-11145-1). This program has significantly instrumented power and cooling loads throughout the 49-year old data center, from the facility level down to individual servers, has performed before- and after- benchmarks, and has been used to justify a multi-year recurring investment of approximately $500K annually in technology refresh and consolidation activities that have created demonstrated reductions in electrical load while increasing computational capacity of both administrative and research high performance computing. See http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/greendc/ and click on the Project Presentations link. See, for instance, the following table which document a 96.4 MTCE reduction: Average IT Power Demand Load Reduction 14.34 kW Annual kWh reduction due to IT equip (24h, 365d) 125,601 kWh Total Facility Power Demand Reduction (PUE of 2.01) 28.82 kW Total Annual kWh reduction 252,458 kWh Estimated Annual Cost Savings ($.185 per kWh) $46,705 Total Facility Carbon Footprint Reduction 96.4 Metric Tons of CO2 Equivalent* *Calculated using 0.00038180 MTCE/kWh The University has developed a shared High Performance Computing facility (see http://hpc.cc.columbia.edu/) that has focused on green procurement of the compute servers as well as energy efficiency achieved through resource sharing. Research Computing is one of the fastest growing areas of IT demand (= carbon footprint). This project also led to the award of a $10M NIH ARRA Grant (1G20RR030893-01) for a Core Research Computing Facility which is upgrading electrical service and implementing a site UPS that will result in energy distribution efficiency improvements and will support further computational resource sharing and the energy efficiency improvements resulting from that. The Research Computing Services group also participates in national consortia and acts as an information clearing-house for the University research enterprise on energy-efficient approaches to research computing. See http://rcs.columbia.edu/ See http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/greendc/ and click on the Project Presentations link. High Performance Computing facility (see http://hpc.cc.columbia.edu/) Research Computing Facility http://rcs.columbia.edu/