Case Study: Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) achieves 3% energy reduction and up to $61K/yr cost savings with Altair's PBS Professional and AcuSolve

Korea Meteorological Administration Implements Cost-saving Innovations for Electricity Usage with PBS Professional and AcuSolve

The Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) needed to control rising energy and cooling costs after deploying its new Cray XC40 Supercomputer Unit 4 with more than 100,000 cores. To discover cost-effective ways to reduce electricity usage while maintaining performance, KMA partnered with Altair, using PBS Professional as the workload manager and Altair’s AcuSolve CFD solver to model A/C behavior and data-center airflow.

Altair ran detailed AcuSolve simulations (with PBS Professional managing workloads) to evaluate floor tiling, airflow paths and thermo‑hygrostat operation, identifying optimal tile configurations and which thermostats could be shut down without harming operations. The Altair-led solution improved cooling efficiency and enabled an expected ~3% reduction in energy use—about 70 million won (≈USD $61,000) per year—while guiding settings for the more energy-efficient Unit 4 (≈30× speed and substantially higher energy efficiency versus Unit 3).

Korea Meteorological Administration

Ha-young Oh

Assistant Director of National Center for Meteorological Supercomputer