Study aims to link wind & solar power, cloud computing

AMD is working with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), HP and Clarkson University in a research project that looks at the industry-wide challenge of channeling renewable energy directly to data centers.

“The distributed computing model of the cloud parallels the distributed power-generation model of solar and wind energy,” said Alan Lee, corporate vice president of research and advanced development at AMD. “Directing power to data centers from these emerging renewable energy resources without relying on a large-scale, traditional electrical grid is a key challenge. One ultimate goal is the co-location of dynamic energy sources with dynamic computing resources to improve the economics, performance, and environmental benefits of both infrastructures.”

Because wind and solar-derived energy can be intermittent, this study will also examine critical questions of how to automatically shift a compute load between data centers and maintain reliability.

The study proposal was developed by AMD engineers in conjunction with Clarkson University, and backing from NYSERDA and other private funding sources are now enabling it to enter the research phase. Students will begin with experiments on how to effectively manage data through a distributed network based on renewable energy. The second phase of the project then aims to incorporate hardware elements, including HP’s Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) based on AMD’s Opteron processor, which was developed for energy efficiency and cloud computing.