SDSC’s new Green campus building
p2pnet news view | P2P:- The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and University of California, San Diego, have opened a new, ‘green,’ energy-efficient building extension which’ll help transform research and education at UC San Diego and throughout the entire UC system, said SDSC director Fran Berman, pressing the huge, green start button.
Key highlights include:
- A natural hybrid displacement ventilation system instead of conventional heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), that leverages filtered outside air so the building thermodynamically “breathes.” This system is designed to provide adequate temperature and humidity levels for more than 95% of the year.
- An optimum building orientation, sun shades, low-E window glazing, exposed concrete interiors, balloon-framed walls, and a solar reflecting roof to dissipate heat.
- Building sensors to measure energy consumption and thermal effectiveness, providing references for future building designs.
- A first-of-its-kind use in the U.S. of a Liebert/Knurr rack system called CoolFlex that encloses traditional cold aisles in the data center, completely separating the cold air supplying equipment from the hot air exhausted from the gear. This separation provides efficient cooling, saving large amounts of fan energy and allowing for more moderate data center temperatures.
- Large, high-efficiency air handling units that blow into the subfloor from below in place of on-floor computer room air handling (CRAH) units. This maximizes available floor space, uses medium-temperature rather than chilled water, and integrates sensors to match cooling with real-time loads.
- Linking in to UC San Diego’s high-efficiency, natural gas cogeneration facility to provide data center power and steam to drive its chilled water plant.
The SDSC says the measures complement initiatives already in place, including:
- Hot aisle / cold aisle configuration in the data center, allowing more equipment to operate within the same cooling “footprint.”
- Hot aisle containment being deployed to separate hot and cold air and further drive cooling efficiencies.
- CRAH-to-ceiling ductwork that allows ceiling tile reconfiguration in dense areas to efficiently extract heat and increase cooling capacity without increasing power consumption.
- High-efficiency uninterrupted power supplies that save over ½ million kilowatt-hours/year over previous units.
- Upgraded CRAH units with variable frequency drive motors and new software with building sensors, with projected savings of 1-2 million kilowatt hours annually.
With five levels and two wings creating a V-shaped floorplan, the new structure doubles the size of the existing supercomputer center to 160,000 square-feet, while increasing SDSC’s overall machine room space to 18,000 square feet.
The mission is to develop and promote ‘cyberinfrastructure,’ an infrastructure that encompasses an open but organized aggregate of information technologies including computers, data archives, networks, software, digital instruments, and other scientific endeavors, says the SDSC.
It’s also working to incorporate cyberinfrastructure into the overall academic infrastructure.
“Just as technology serves as the driver for the Industrial Age, cyberinfrastructure is the driver for the Information Age,” said Berman. “It will allow us to harness the technologies of the Information Age to create new knowledge and expand our efforts across the barriers of geography, time, and individual capability.”
The SDSC also has more archival storage capacity than any other academic institution in the world, with capacity equal to about 25 petabytes (25 thousand trillion bytes), or about 1,000 times the digital plain-text equivalent of the printed collection in the Library of Congress. This capacity is in response to the ever-increasing amount of digital data, which, according to industry reports, could grow ten-fold between 2006 and 2011.
In addition to being the main data repository for TeraGrid, the nation’s largest open scientific discovery infrastructure linking compute resources among 11 partner sites across the US, SDSC is working in close collaboration with the UCSD Libraries on the development of long-term data preservation services for UC San Diego and beyond.
The new building is also home to one of the first ‘OptIPortals,’ connected to the NSF TeraGrid via the ‘OptIPuter,’ an optical network device developed by UC San Diego’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2),”says the SDSC, adding:
“OptIPuter is widely viewed by high-performance supercomputing experts and users as a key step in creating a computer cyberinfrastructure, by allowing end-users to discover, reserve, and integrate remote computers, storage, and instruments.”
SDSC – San Diego Supercomputer Center Dedicates New ‘Green’ Campus Building, October 14, 2008
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