It's been a busy month so far for green IT conferences -- I've been at the Uptime Symposium and SAP Sapphire Now already this month -- even if those events have been either not entirely green-focused (Uptime) or not entirely IT-focused (SAP). Coming up this week is one that promises to be both.

Starting today, San Francisco is hosting the Green Data Center Conference, put on by the Global Strategic Management Institute. The three-day event is focused on green IT and the cloud, and a glance at the event's program, it looks like for once the cloud presentations won't be overshadowing the green presentations.

In the run-up to the event, I got a chance to talk with Krista Laursen, the Project Director for the National Center for Atmospheric Research's NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center. Laursen will be presenting at the conference about the project, which aims to bring a new level of energy efficiency to NCAR's supercomputing facilities.

The NWSC, when it begins computing next spring, will be an almost 171,000-square-foot building, with 24,000 total square feet of raised-floor computing space.

Climate modeling, as you might suspect, is a very data-intensive process, and one that's taking on increasing urgency as the world begins to address threats from climate change.

At the same time, data center operators are faced with significant constraints on a number of fronts, not the least of which are energy availability and energy costs. So when you're looking at building a new facility, a number of considerations are important.

During our phone conversation, Laursen explained that the team that worked on developing the facility had three main concerns:

• A long lifespan;
• Maximum energy efficiency;
• Overall, holistic sustainability

In a nutshell, the Cheyenne, Wyoming, location meets all of those needs.

"Ultimately, we would like the facility to have a 20- to 30-year lifetime," Laursen said. "Along with our sustainability goals and maximized energy efficiency goals, we wanted to put the facility in a place where it was expandable, but not overbuilt.

"It's important to us at NCAR to be mindful of our environmental responsibility," Laursen said. "It was intriguing, when we took a close look at the Wyoming site, what the climate capabilities are like. We did a lot of meteorological analyses and we found that by building there that we could really use the local climate to our advantage.

By locating in Cheyenne, the NWSC facility will be able to use free outside-air cooling for 96 percent of the year. The site also has fiber-optic connectivity -- a key feature for any supercomputing facility, but especially one where most of the users will access its servers remotely -- and will also allow the facility to expand over the course of the coming decades without having to move or open a new location.

Next page: What's the PUE for green supercomputing?