Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CATALYST (Converting DCs in Energy Flexibility Ecosystems (CATALYST))
Teaser
Human activities are becoming more and more digitised. Huge amount of data is stored, managed, processed in a continuously increasing number of Data Centres that, today, are among the largest energy consumers and in the next future could need a quantity of energy per year...
Summary
Human activities are becoming more and more digitised. Huge amount of data is stored, managed, processed in a continuously increasing number of Data Centres that, today, are among the largest energy consumers and in the next future could need a quantity of energy per year equal to one fifth of the global energy consumption. Integrating renewable sources, improving energy efficiency, reuse waste heat as well as opening these facilities to the surrounding areas by enabling the exchange of energy between data centres and neighbourhood areas are some of potential solutions to reduce energy consumption, to improve DC reliability and to ensure the resilience of energy supply to climate changes. However, very few solutions, despite validated in lab, have been successfully deployed on operational DCs, mostly due to technological fragmentation, excessive CAPEX and lack of appropriate business models. CATALYST will address these challenges through turning existing/new DCs into flexible multi-energy hubs, which can sustain investments in RES and energy efficiency by offering mutualized flexibility services to the smart energy grids (both electricity and heat grids). By leveraging on the outcomes of FP7 GEYSER and DOLPHIN projects, CATALYST will adapt, scale up, validate and deploy an innovative, adaptable technological and business framework aimed at:
i) exploiting available DC non-IT legacy assets (onsite RES/backup generation, UPS/batteries,
cooling system thermal inertia, heat pump for waste heat reuse) to deliver simultaneous energy flexibility services to multi-energy coupled electricity/heat/IT load marketplaces;
ii) deploying Cross-DC cross-infrastructures (e.g. heat vs IT) IT workload orchestration, by combining heat-demand driven HPC geographical workload balancing, with traceable ICT-load migration between federated DCs to match IT demands with time-varying on-site RES (“follow the energy approachâ€);
iii) providing marketplace-as-a-service tools to nurture novel ESCO2.0 business models. The adaptation and replication potential of CATALYST will be demonstrated through carrying out four different real-life trials spanning through the full spectrum of DCs types (fully distributed DCs, HPC, co-location, legacy) and architectures (from large centralized versus decentralized micro-DCs).
Work performed
The CATALYST project has achieved all the planned objectives. Starting from the results of GEYSER, DOLFIN and EURECA, the Consortium has identified functional and not functional requirements of the CATALYST technological framework. After the requirements elicitation phase, a first draft of the software architecture has been designed and then updated and detailed in the second half of the reporting period. The key components necessary for the workload migration among DCs have been implemented in their first versions (Virtual Container Generator Server and Client, the Federated DC IT Load Migration Controller, the Load Balancer (LB)). Models have been defined for estimating the electrical and thermal energy flexibility of DC’s IT and facility resources. Concerning the energy electrical flexibility, proper models have been developed for IT servers and server room system, cooling system, energy storage system, energy production system and energy distribution system. Concerning thermal energy flexibility, models have been developed for the server rooms system and the heat re-use system. A thermal prediction model has been implemented and trained to predict the hot air temperature distribution in the server room and amount of heat to be reused. For electrical energy flexibility a prediction infrastructure was implemented able to deal with large amounts of energy data generated by the DC monitoring systems.
A first prototype of the Marketplace, able to manage energy (electricity and heat/cold), flexibility and IT workload, is under development. A first re-structuring of the GEYSER marketplace has been done to address the necessary functionality required by the CATALYST marketplace and the Energy Aware IT Load Balancer has been integrated as IT marketplace clearing mechanism.
Proper integration Guidelines have been released that include conventions related to design, development and integration.
The Consortium has specified how the CATALYST solution can be validated and proved in the four available pilots. Research concepts have been already presented in several events and submitted, in the form of papers, to conferences (2) and journals (4).
A first version of the potential business models has been drafted.
The public project website has been released and the dissemination material (including logo, leaflet, artworks etc.) has been completely developed.
A Green DC Assessment Toolkit has been released. A Green DC Stakeholder Group Manifesto has been released too. A great effort has been and is being spent in establishing the Green Data Centre – Stakeholder Group focusing at this stage on gaining visibility and support from both the data centre and energy communities.
Final results
CATALYST aims at applying many technological innovations to existing and new DCs that mainly concern:
1) DC waste heat reuse/regeneration and DHC integration (by delivering an innovative energy flexibility framework considering waste heat regeneration/reuse)
2) Multi-carrier marketplaces (by proposing and validating innovative multi-carrier marketplaces which enable next generation DCs to offer mutualised yet synergetic optimization services to the Smart Energy system)
3) Electrical and thermal energy flexibility optimization (by proposing the development of an optimization engine that will address the DC energy flexibility in a holistic and integrated manner while considering both the electrical and thermal energy types).
4) Reverse Demand Response (DR) model: Holistic, closed-loop energy prediction ( by releasing the first holistic, real-life, close to market framework to reverse the DR model into a predictive and proactive, RD model).
5) “Follow the energy†flexible placement of IT load (by releasing the innovative “follow the energy†concept, where energy-aware mapping algorithms, for placement, scaling and migration, will be implemented and validated).
Thanks to all the innovative tools that CATALYST will release, a relevant impact is expected on DC domains as well as on society:
A) Bringing data centre specific innovative energy efficiency technologies and solutions, already developed by research projects, to market faster and cheaper.
B) Reaching a Power Usage Effectiveness of up to 1.2.
C) Achieving a high share of the data centre energy consumption covered by sustainable energy resources.
Website & more info
More info: http://project-catalyst.eu/.