Climate change threatens supercomputers

The California wildfire known as the Camp Fire reduced several towns to ashes and killed at least 85 people in a year when the state was in the grips of a severe and long-term dry spell. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is 230 kilometers away from the scene of the fire. Outside air is usually used to cool the hot electronics at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Engineers were forced to cool recirculated air because of the fire.

Norm Bourassa, an energy performance engineer at NERSC, says, "That's when we discovered, 'WOW, this is a real event,'" It was hot and dry again a year later. California utilities cut NERSC's power because of fears that winds near LBNL would blow trees into power lines and cause new fires. Many machines were shut down for a long time because of the backup generators.

Climate change is costing managers at high- performance computing facilities a lot of money. With their heavy demands for cooling and massive appetite for energy, high performance computing centers are vulnerable. Extreme weather is making the location of supercomputers much more difficult.

Climate change can cause both heat and humidity to increase, which can affect the efficiency of the evaporative coolers used in many centers. During a second fire, NERSC discovered that the computers themselves could be threatened by humidity. As air was recirculated, condensation built up in server racks and caused a cabinet to blow. In order to cool and dehumidify the air when it opens its next computer, the NERSC is planning to install power-hungry chiller units.

Nicolas Dubé, chief technologist for Hewlett Packard enterprise's high performance computing division, says that the cost of adaptation is motivating some centers to move to cooler climates. It doesn't make sense to build in some locations. We need to go north.

Some facilities get stuck. The simulations of the detonation of nuclear weapons are done on the supercomputers. Chief Engineer Anna-Maria Bailey said that the cost of relocating specialized personnel could be prohibitive. The possibility of moving the computers underground is being studied by the lab. She saysHumidity and temperature control could be done like a wine cave.

Climate change can be hard to run from. The National Center for Atmospheric Research opened a site in Wyoming in 2012 to take advantage of the dry air. Climate change has made it harder to cool the area. The Wyoming center added a backup cooling unit. It's expensive to build infrastructure to meet the worst conditions.

Electricity is the main source of power for these facilities. The centers consume as much power as a small town. Increased power demands can be made by other users. The facility was told to prepare for power cuts when air-conditioning use went up. The laboratory had never been asked to prepare for non-voluntary cuts.

Water is piped around components to carry away heat, which will be hard to find in the western United States due to the current dry spell. Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico invested in water treatment facilities a decade ago so that it could use reclaimed wastewater instead of more precious municipal water.

The RIKEN facility in Kobe, Japan, has to contend with power failures because of storms, which are expected to get more intense as global warming increases. The power was cut for more than 45 hours in the middle of the year due to flooding. The facility was knocked out for 15 hours by a lightning strike this year. Fumiyoshi Shoji is the director of operations and computer technologies at the center. The research projects would stall if the system were not available.

Future supercomputers will need to be built in ways that will allow them to cut performance during bad weather, and that will require cooling and power. We are building race cars with a throttle.