On Friday I drove out to Holyoke, MA, for the ribbon cutting ceremony of the Mass Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). In addition to the Governor of Massachusetts, all five universities were represented (Harvard, Northeastern, MIT, UMASS, and Boston University), as well as Cisco and EMC.
MGHPCC is a research computing and data center that supports the growing research computing needs of the five universities. President Susan Hockfield of MIT mentioned that the budgets of each school are extremely challenged when it comes to the purchase and operation of cloud and big data computing infrastructure. Consolidating and sharing the resources at MGHPCC not only solves that problem but also brings jobs and high-tech educational programs to central Massachusetts.
I took a tour of the impressive facility. There is a lot to write about, from the efficient building operation, to engagements with local youth, and to the research itself being planned by the five schools.
My favorite part of the day, however, was the tour of the data center. It is massive and will be quite incredible once it is filled with compute, network, and storage. As with most data centers, one of the biggest problems will be cooling the systems. Room temperature air, when drawn across the systems, will result in quite a bit of hot air. Our tour guide mentioned that heat is notoriously difficult to move from one location to another.
MGHPCC has solved this problem by trapping the hot air output in an enclosed room. Two banks of racks spill their exhaust into this enclosed area so that the heat is localized within one part of the facility (as opposed to spilling out into the wide-open air of the large room). Cold water is run through this small room and the heat is transferred out of the data center. The cold water will be chilled naturaly during seventy percent of the year (due to the New England climate).
I took a picture of this configuration, which shows the backs of all of the racks facing into the enclosed room:
Cisco and EMC (CTO of Strategy Jeff Nick) both spoke about their plans for supporting research at the data center. As Governor Deval Patrick out, if the enthusiasm used to build the data center is not directed towards the research, then the Commonwealth will not have accomplished anything at all.
Between MGHPCC and Hack/Reduce, the State of Massachusetts is on a roll.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Fellow
Hi Steve,
Would it be possible to use your ‘MGHPCC Cuts the Ribbon’ photo (with credits of course) for a spotlight we’re doing in iSGTW (www.isgtw.org)
Amber Harmon
alharmon@iupui.edu