Speaking Slot: 17 June 2019 – 16:40 till 17:00
(Hall 3 – booth N-210)
Subject: Design and Operation of a 3 MW Datacenter based on Prefabricated Modules – CERN’s Reply to the Computing and Storage Challenges related to the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) Upgrade Program
CERN, in cooperation with LHCb, is currently building a new 3MW data center. The purpose of this data center is the consolidation and filtering, in real time, of a 5 TB/s data stream coming from a High Energy Physics experiment.
The datacenter is divided into 2 logical units.
Unit 1, consisting of two 18m SAFE (*) Prefabricated modules, receives the data stream on approximately 17000 optical links and assembles and distributes data sets to the filter processing unit.
Unit 2 consists of four 18m SAFE Prefabricated modules housing the bulk of the computation power which is used to reduce the immense data volume to more manageable quantities.
The datacenter modules themselves are cooled via indirect fresh air cooling with an additional adiabatic cooling stage during warm periods. Rack power density is 22 kw per rack.
At the time of this presentation CERN will have been operating the first stage of this datacenter for nearly 6 months and will present first results and lessons learned from its construction and operation.
