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Facilities
Meeting green power
and cooling objectives
When a leading UK university wished to implement and operate one
of the UK’s most powerful new supercomputers within strict energy
efficiency parameters, Comtec provided an advanced APC
datacentre environment to provide power, cooling and resilience.
To extend Cardiff University’s position and materials sciences. Our aim is to University’s overall commitment to
as a global centre for research, an benefit all areas of research with environmental sustainability, ARCCA
ambitious project was conceived in capabilities that push the boundaries specified that the supporting
2005 to invest significant SRIF-3 of supercomputing in international datacentre environment take fullest
funding to create a HPC (high academia.” advantage of available technologies
performance computing) facility and techniques to minimise energy
capable of supporting extensive The supercomputer cluster and its consumption and – in so doing – its
research activities for Cardiff underlying datacentre infrastructure environmental impact.
University. needed to be of sufficient magnitude
and scalability to cope with The critical question of providing a
The project, called ARCCA (Advanced extraordinary demands. Provided by resilient, harmonised, efficient and
Research Computing @ Cardiff) Bull, and codenamed ‘Merlin’, the scalable datacentre solution to meet
established a dedicated team of cluster was designed to facilitate the these needs was answered by
research computing professionals advanced research requirements of all Comtec Enterprises, using
responsible for specifying and 29 University schools/faculties, as well components from the APC
managing the required infrastructure as potentially the requirements of InfraStruXure® datacentre solutions
components and providing a support private/industry third parties. range.
and coordination role for researchers “The facility has a theoretical capacity
across the twenty-nine of 24 teraflops per second, and in “Cardiff University has an ongoing
schools/faculties of the university. Linpack benchmark testing achieved commitment to sustainability and
Professor Martyn Guest is Director of exactly 20.00 teraflop/s. This places it environmental policy that covers all of
ARCCA: firmly at the top end of UK academic its operations, not only those related
institutions, and among the most to computing/IT. To fulfil our aim to
“ARCCA was designed to guide and powerful supercomputers in the maximise the efficiency of the
assist researchers in their use of country. With the computational datacentre, we were clear from the
computing resources, from elements very dense and of extremely outset that ‘close-coupled’ water-
distributed/grid systems such as high specification, we needed a based cooling and containment were
Condor through to support for datacentre environment that could key strategies, and this led us toward
departmental clusters and – at its underpin the required power and APC technology.”
furthest extent – the development of a cooling considerations and an
standalone HPC facility. We want to exceptional level of resilience.” Best and latest APC
reach out to non-traditional adopters technology
of HPC facilities as well as traditionally In order to operate the ARCCA A key component of the APC
‘heavy’ users such as astrophysics infrastructure in line with the InfraStruXure® architecture is its
28 | DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS |
www.datacentresols.com Winter 2008
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