We are glad to share with you the results of the Master Thesis (in German) of Christoph Möder entitled «Suggestions for optimizing the server room at the ETH Zurich based on a cost and energy analysis». Providers of HPC services are increasingly faced with questions about energy costs and this study provides a good reference point.
You can download the main document or the appendix of the master thesis as PDF.
In his study, Mr. Mäder analyses first the power consumption of the existing IT servers and his infrastructure as their total cost of ownership (without building costs). The share of electricity consumption in the server rooms (excluding CSCS) is 25% of total electricity consumption of the ETH Zurich (page 27). The total cost (excluding CSCS) is 27 million CHF per year (page 29).
The breakdown of electricity consumption by application and the cost structure are shown for individual data centers and server rooms in Chapter 4.2 and 4.4.
In Figure 21 (page 28) the author computes for each data center the energy density and the PUE values. Figure 23 (page 29) shows also the cost per server room space and the cost per IT service.
In Chapter 6 (page 33), Mr Maeder gives suggestions and recommendations how the energy consumption and costs can be optimized. In Figure 31 (Page 4) the savings potential of these optimization approaches, depending on cost and feasibility are presented.
