Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

The Jülich VIP data center tour was a rare treat. I can only imagine anthropologists examining the site 100's of years from now and wondering why anyone would run 5 MW of power and 1000's of gallons an hour of water into the basement of a gymnasium sized building.

Running a PetaFlop BlueGene system, a 2000 node Sun cluster, and a 1000 node Bull cluster takes a lot of cooling water. The facilities work that goes into a modern HPC data center is an absolutely amazing act of mechanical engineering in and of itself, never mind the computers.

If you look closely you will see the chilled water connector from the Sun Constellation System rear cooling door at the bottom right of the rack. A flexible connector is used to connect to the under-floor chiller water supply. There is also a top-of-door connector (not shown) for customers who run chiller water pipes above the racks.

Here is another shot of the under-floor piping.

Sun also has a gas refrigerant cooling door option for Sun Constellation System. The gas refrigerant door requires smaller diameter piping to the racks and can have other advantages, although it does require an external unit which can be outside the computer room, typically with its own chilled water heat exchanger. Sun's data center design team can help design the ideal data center cooling system for your Sun Constellation System.