ACADEMIA

Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) have announced they were selected as finalists of the 2012 Green Enterprise IT (GEIT) Awards presented by the Uptime Institute.

The GEIT Awards showcase organizations that are pioneering energy-efficiency improvements in their IT and data center operations. GRC and TACC will be honored at the seventh annual Uptime Institute Symposium to take place in Santa Clara, CA, from May 14 to 17 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

TACC is being recognized in the “Facility Product Deployment” category for its adoption of fluid-submersion cooling technology produced by Green Revolution Cooling. The technology, called the CarnotJet system, submerges data center servers in GreenDEF coolant, a white mineral oil with 1,200 times the heat retention capacity of air. The installation exhibits an 85 percent reduction in cooling power compared to air-cooled systems. The single-rack system uses less than six percent of IT energy for cooling and saves approximately $3,480 and 28.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

“Energy consumption and cost are of critical importance to TACC as the size of supercomputers continues to grow,” said Tommy Minyard, director of Advanced Computing Systems at TACC. “We were excited to work with GRC in this pioneering first deployment, and look forward to repeating this on a much larger scale in future systems.”

GRC brought its technology to market with this installation at TACC in mid-2010. The company now has installations at five of the Top 100 supercomputing sites worldwide with an installed capacity approaching one megawatt.

CEO and Founder Christiaan Best said, “We’re pleased to receive recognition for this installation at TACC. In addition to the impressive energy savings that have been on display in TACC’s data center for nearly two years, the installation has spring-boarded us into hosting, banking, research and seismic processing data centers around the world. We look forward to the completion of our next joint project with TACC.”

A principal objective of the GEIT Awards is to educate the data center and IT industries in effective ways to reduce energy and resource consumption by highlighting innovation and best practices. The awards are open to applicants in all countries and entries are thoroughly reviewed by an international committee of independent judges. Past winners include AOL, Hewlett-Packard, Helsingin Energia, Itaú, MassMutual Financial Group, Savvis, Schneider Electric, Sun Microsystems, the University of Notre Dame, the US House of Representatives and Verizon Wireless.