ABB and HPE Collaborate to Reduce Energy Consumption of Supercomputers

ABB is collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on jointly developed technology to reduce the energy consumption of high-performance supercomputers, while at the same time increasing their computing capacity and reliability.

HPE’s Cray supercomputers use a tailored ABB higher voltage direct current (DC)1 power supply solution, which makes it possible to reduce the use of copper by a factor of 14.  Another environmental and efficiency benefit of higher voltage DC is the vast reduction of power losses: by as much as 95 percent.  A connected solution furthermore enables power supply to ramp up power or scale down, depending on the computing load, creating peak efficiency during light computing loads as well as when the system is fully loaded.

Real-time monitoring of thermal and power aspects of supercomputers adds another benefit.  HPE servers offer embedded power and thermal monitors on critical components with output data aggregated and reported through HPE Integrated Lights Out (iLO), a proprietary and remote server management software that enables seamless and secure configuration, monitoring, and updating of HPE servers.  iLO allows users to monitor equipment utilization, power consumption, and thermal output via tools, such as HPE OneView, HPE InfoSight, ABB Ability Data Center Automation, or 3rd party Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and take action to optimize operations.

When combined with ABB Ability Data Center Automation, ABB’s industrial solution for on-premise and hybrid cloud environments, HPE and ABB are able to automate the correlation between workload and CPU dynamics with cooling of the data centers, resulting in a reduction of energy use of up to 30 percent.