Supercomputing is at the day’s order. Each time are more the governments that invest in this new form of investigation and data processing. Just like today’s scientists say «who doesn’t compute, doesn’t compete». This technology has been advancing progressively, going from the megaflop to the gigaflop, to later teraflops, and from there to petaflops. The next stop will be the exaflop, the last, up until now, the zettaflop.
A growth symptom
Even if Brazil is the country with the most powerful supercomputers in Latin America, Mexico «doesn’t want stay behind in this race» points out Humberto Salazar, from BUAP.
The National Laboratory for Supercomputing, located in first place at a 40 m2 data center, is already in its final destination, a new 32 m2 data center. “Our plan is to bring the certification level to the previous data center to have a total area of more than 70 m2”, points out Humberto Salazar.
But it doesn’t finishes here. Once researchers use all the equipment, «our biggest project will be to attend the demand of the industrial sector, and the governmental, with the intention of saving for the next purchase», says.
This way, in a maximum of three to four years, the university pretends to reach to the teraflop, so it is being planified to build a 200 m2 data center “All of this thanks to a well consolidated business plan and investment recovery so that the equipment is permanently updated», added.
Europe is also betting for supercomputing in latin america. The European Organization for Nuclear Investigation (CERN) has donated high technology equipment, estimated in two million dollars to the Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas (Unach) in Mexico for its new Regional Laboratory for High Performance Computing. This donation has consisisted of 384 servers for compute equipments, 26 42 U racks and 24 capa 3 switches . Once installed, the equipment, of 12 tons weight, will have a capacity of 901 terabytes storage, 740 proccessors and 2.960 processing nodes.
Cooling by water
The data centers becomes here in the principal ally of the supercomputers. These machines produce environments which are too dense due to their higher number of processors and less space, generating much heat, so a cooling capacity becomes necessary. Leftraru is located in a 100 m2 data center, besides its big brother, the older supercomputer of Universidad de Chile. With a 30% of free capacity, what makes this data center special is its cooling system.
“The two racks where the compute nodes are located are cooled by water. These racks receive some 90 liters of water by minute at 10ºC. With this it is achieved to keep the temperature inside the rack to a 20ºC, functioning at full charge. This allows us to increase the frequency of the processors and that they function perfectly, with an optimal and low temperature», explains guerrero.
A latent concern
Although the imperative of these supercomputers is the power they offer, each time is more the concern that exists for reaching a higher energetic efficiency. So much so, parallel to the Top500 ranking, that encompasses the classification of the supercomputers from an energetic efficiency point of view. This list analyzes the compute capacity that can perform a computer for each consumed wat.
Example of this is the BUAP, whose supercomputer consumes 19 kW/racks. Leftraru doesn’t stay behind either, according to the Linpack test, “we have 44 teraflops from the almost 46 that we could obtain. This is produced by the efficiency of the supercomputer that, thanks to the cooling system by water, we can increase a little the frequency of the processors gaining an efficiency of the cluster close to a 100%”, adds Ginés.
The concern for the sustainability also extends to the data centers. According to Eduardo Vera, the chilean Patagonia chilena has “exceptional conditions” for gaining energy at a low cost. “There´s very cold temperatures that are tremendously important for the lowering of the cooling cost of the supercomputing cluster. We have been proposing to the government and discovering a zone where a pretty green industry could be created”, explains.
Source: DatacenterDynamics