It's my experience that when building large clusters, issues of space, power
and cooling are often harder and more time-consuming to resolve than actually
getting the cluster itself purchased, commissioned, and operating. For
that is somewhat perplexing, since the space/power/cooling issues aren't
really _that_ complicated. I think it's one of those areas where too much
choice leads to harder decisions. perhaps it also reflects the fact that
we're still not really comfortable with the state of affairs - for instance,
vendors still advocate blade servers, which if fully populated are basically
uncoolable (~24 KW/rack!).
example I've recently taken up a new position in Hannover Germany where as
part of my start-up package the MPG is building a cluster room (450 square
meters floor space, 500kW cooling, 800kW UPS, with the option to double
cooling/power in four years).
those numbers seem strange to me - unless I've botched conversion,
the cluster I sit next to is about 4.7 KW/sq-m. (such a large UPS seems
strange too - did they choose it based on poor quality line power?
we have none of our compute hardware on UPS, and don't have problems,
since modern PDUs seem to ride out the typical 1-second glitch without
much trouble...)
end of this year. So total design and construction time is 2.3 years. In
that's a bit extreme, I think. our room was a bare-slab reno and took
a bit over a year. another one of our sites was built from scratch and
took about 1.5.
construction time will be about 0.5 years. The cost of the cluster room is
about equal to the cost of the initial cluster that will go into it. But the
strange. I'm pretty sure the cost ratio we see is more like 4:1 for the
from-scratch site (and closer to 10:1 for renos.)
regards, mark hahn.
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