Project Description
FROM THE ARCHITECTS:
The LEED Gold Facebook Prineville Data Center was designed to be one of the most energy efficient facilities in the world. To achieve this goal building systems operate in concert with processes running on more than 100,000 custom servers directly controlling the building mechanical systems.
The computer equipment rooms and mechanical penthouse function as an occupied air handler; architecture wrapped around air flow. The building expends no energy for mechanical cooling. Warm exhaust air from the server rooms heats the office areas. Electrical power to the servers goes through as few energy robbing transformations as possible. The result is a building that is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers.
In an industry where designs are treated as proprietary and secret, Facebook has made the design of every aspect of their data center public through OpenCompute.org. This program is meant to hack conventional computing infrastructure, to make data centers and hardware more efficient while shrinking their environmental footprint and accelerating the pace of innovation.
Open Compute is resetting energy consumption expectations for an industry that has been projected to consume as much as 5% of the nation’s electrical power production.