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Future Computing Power Challenges at CERN

Addressing power and cooling challenges in computing equipment evolution at CERN, projecting increasing power demands and exploring housing solutions for future capacity needs.

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Future Computing Power Challenges at CERN

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  1. Power and Cooling ChallengesatCERNIHEPCCC MeetingApril 24th 2007 Tony Cass

  2. Basic Issues • Computing equipment is not becoming more energy efficient • Or, rather, not as rapidly as performance improves • Rack power density is increasing • From 1.5kW to 8kW now with 15+kW foreseen • Power demand will grow with increasing requirement for LHC computing • Conservative assumptions lead to ~20MW by 2020 • “Moore’s law” growth in capacity, as seen for LEP, leads to prediction of ~100MW by 2020. • “Critical” IT loads are at planned capacity limit of 250kW now and demand is growing • “critical” => with infinite diesel backup in the event of severe power outage. • “physics” load loses power after <10 minutes if both French and Swiss power are unavailable. Housing Future Computing Equipment - 2

  3. Evolution of power and performance INTEL and AMD processors installed at CERN 8 cores 2.33 GHz 4 cores 3 GHz 4 cores 2.2 GHz 2 cores 1 GHz 2 cores 2.4 GHz 2 cores 2.8 GHz

  4. Basic Issues • Computing equipment is not becoming more energy efficient • Or, rather, not as rapidly as performance improves • Rack power density is increasing • From 1.5kW to 8kW now with 15+kW foreseen • Power demand will grow with increasing requirement for LHC computing • Conservative assumptions lead to ~20MW by 2020 • “Moore’s law” growth in capacity, as seen for LEP, leads to prediction of ~100MW by 2020. • “Critical” IT loads are at planned capacity limit of 250kW now and demand is growing • “critical” => with infinite diesel backup in the event of severe power outage. • “physics” load loses power after <10 minutes if both French and Swiss power are unavailable. Housing Future Computing Equipment - 4

  5. Project Power Evolution Housing Future Computing Equipment - 5

  6. Basic Issues • Computing equipment is not becoming more energy efficient • Or, rather, not as rapidly as performance improves • Rack power density is increasing • From 1.5kW to 8kW now with 15+kW foreseen • Power demand will grow with increasing requirement for LHC computing • Conservative assumptions lead to ~20MW by 2020 • “Moore’s law” growth in capacity, as seen for LEP, leads to prediction of ~100MW by 2020. • “Critical” IT loads are at planned capacity limit of 250kW now and demand is growing • “critical” => with infinite diesel backup in the event of severe power outage. • “physics” load loses power after <10 minutes if both French and Swiss power are unavailable. Housing Future Computing Equipment - 6

  7. Follow on issues • The Meyrin site (with the Computer Centre) is at ~maximum consumption • 66MVA; limited by autotransfer system (between French & Swiss supplies) and feed from Prévessin. • Diesel capacity is limited to 350kW for CC • we will couple the two 300kVA UPS modules to gain headroom at the expense of redundancy; no clear growth path thereafter • (redundant) local diesel capacity?? • B513 is very poorly designed from a modern HVAC standpoint • cooling 2.5MW will be a struggle, although there a number of optimisations still to make. • CFD simulations interesting, but hampered by lack of real data on server air flow rates. Housing Future Computing Equipment - 7

  8. What are we doing? • Convincing ourselves air cooling is OK • Mostly done; power density of up to ~20kW/rack looks achievable within optimally designed building (long and thin, not square; unobstructed airflows; rigorous hot/cold aisle separation) • As an alternative, prefer “open” racks with heat exchanger on the back to “closed” racks with internal air flow. • better able to cope with failure or, and more likely, door openings. • Studying future options • using the existing computer centre, for example by installing equipment at a higher power/m2 density; • using the “barn” [adjacent to the current machine room]; • using alternative buildings on one of the CERN sites - e.g. the former water tank (B226), the B186 assembly hall and B927 on the Prévessin site; • renting or purchasing space in a computing centre in the Geneva area; • purchasing the full computing service from a service provider (e.g. Amazon’s Computing Cloud). • Shipping container options (stop gap for 2010/11 if we don’t have a definitive solution by then???) Housing Future Computing Equipment - 8

  9. Summary • Power demand will exceed capacity by 2010 at the latest. • Considering options to deliver increased capacity • but we are behind schedule to meet the 2010 crossover so stopgap solutions may be necessary. • Money will be needed • Intel consider construction cost of new centre is $6/W. 40-60M€ for 20MW facility? But a modular design would spread costs. • Operation is 350k€/compute-MW/year assuming an HVAC overhead of 30% Housing Future Computing Equipment - 9

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