The Graham Hills server room on level 1 and computer lab 1.07 in the James Weir building have been selected as sites to be investigated for Strathclyde’s U-CARE project.
The server room uses one quarter of all power consumption for the Graham Hills building. The Engineering faculty’s high performance computing hardware is situated here. The Graham Hills server room has 3 close control cooling units, which are fed by 2 chillers located in the Graham Hills car park.
The setup is shown in the diagram below (click diagram to enlarge):
Graham Hills' Metering Diagram
Monitoring and data trending is enabled via the (Honeywell) Building Management System (BMS). Electrical demand of the following is enabled: close control units 1, close control unit 2, close control unit 3, chiller 1, chiller 2, general small power, MCC, and UPS. The main power, which runs in parallel to the UPS is currently metered, but not enabled on the BMS. Honeywell have been contacted to resolve. In addition to electrical demand metering, the following system points are being trended: flow and return temperatures from the chillers to the CCU’s, room temperature, and outdoor air temperature.
Two Close Control Units should be operational at any one time, with the third idle. The operational/idle units are rotated weekly. Only one chiller should be operational at any given time. Free cooling ought to be enabled for much of the chiller run cycle.
The second site, the James Weir lab (1.07), has 50 desktop PCs in it so it is representative of the size of a number of labs across the institution. It has been selected partly due to ease of access to the air conditioning unit. A portable data logger has been procured to begin metering energy consumption within this site.