The design of the Sun-designed CLUMEQ Colossus supercomputer.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Sun Microsystems is helping to convert a silo at the CLUMEQ center in Quebec into a data center, according to a report by Data Center Knowledge.
Standing 65 feet high and 36 feet wide with two-foot thick concrete walls, the cylindrical silo stands originally held the Van de Graaf particle accelerator.
Soon after the accelerator was decommissioned, CLUMEQ decided to transform the facility into a high-performance supercomputer known as Colossus.
Announced earlier this year, Sun revealed more details about the facility’s design and cooling system at last month’s HPC Consortium.
The CLUMEQ Colossus cylinder features an interior “hot core” in the center of the building, which uses the outside ring as the cold air plenum.
On each floor, the cabinets are placed in a ring where they face the outside of the silo. The floors themselves consist of grates instead of solid flooring to facilitate airflow through the facility.
Meanwhile, the basement holds the cooling coils and air handlers, in which chilled air moves upward through the outside cold aisle and through the racks of servers.
The waste heat then moves to the rear of the racks into the hot core, where it is distributed back to the basement via the cold aisle.
The air flow pattern is maintained through differential air pressure, which provides continual distribution of air through the facility. Free cooling will allow up to 300 kilowatts of cooling capacity by using fresh air from outside.
The whole facility will cool itself, armed with a peak computing power of 86 teraflops of compute power.
The data center features Sun Constellation HPC systems feature 10 fully loaded Sun Blade 6048 chassis, 1 petabyte of Lustre storage and Sun J4400 storage arrays.
Meanwhile, the facility’s racks are distributed over three floors, with the switches on the second floor to ensure that the cable runs are as short as possible.
Sun offers a full description of the CLUMEQ design, in this six minute video.
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