Energy dataset of Frontier supercomputer for waste heat recovery

The Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Cray EX Frontier is the world's first and fastest exascale supercomputer, hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee, United States. Frontier is a significant electricity consumer, drawing 8-30 MW; this massive energy demand produces significant waste heat, requiring extensive cooling measures. Although harnessing this waste heat for campus heating is a sustainability goal at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the 30 °C-38 °C waste heat temperature poses compatibility issues with standard HVAC systems. Heat pump systems, prevalent in residential settings and some industries, can efficiently upgrade low-quality heat to usable energy for buildings. Thus, heat pump technology powered by renewable electricity offers an efficient, cost-effective solution for substantial waste heat recovery. However, a major challenge is the absence of benchmark data on high-performance computing (HPC) heat generation and waste heat profiles. This paper reports power demand and waste heat measurements from an ORNL HPC data centre, aiming to guide future research on optimizing waste heat recovery in large-scale data centres, especially those of HPC calibre.