Making a Data Paradise

October 11, 2007

In 2006, the center addressed the need for greater computational capacity by developing plans to implement a terascale high-performance computing platform from Dell. The 5,120-processor Dell PowerEdge 1955 system would increase the computational capability of the center’s high-performance computing platform to 60 teraflops (60 by 1012 floating point operations per second), ranking it among the fastest supercomputers in the world.

The new system represented the biggest single investment in the center’s history, and required a new 8,000-sf data center to house the system. Because planned upgrades will increase overall computational capability to 120 teraflops within two years, the new facility required a dynamic power and cooling infrastructure that could scale to handle the added power demands and heat load. As a national resource for vital government research, MHPCC has a business-critical continuity goal of 100 percent availability. This lofty expectation is consistently threatened by geographic conditions as MHPCC is located in a remote area that experiences frequent loss of commercial power and is subject to earthquakes and tropical storms. “Our entire business is information technology and the necessity for maintaining operational capability is absolute,” says Carl Shelton, MHPCC facility manager.

Mission Critical Magazine

2020 September/October

There's a lot to consider when it comes to data center efficiency — this issue of Mission Critical focuses on the IT equipment and other rack space considerations.

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