Post by jdd2 on Nov 23, 2022 20:17:18 GMT -5
About the time I first started at U-ILL ('70), ILLIAC IV had been shut down/moved from there due to protests. Now, the computer center where that was going to be (and where I then played with some punch cards) is a square block-sized monolithic building.
Who know what they do there now...
Who know what they do there now...
A machine the scale of Blue Waters introduces special concerns with regards to cooling and power. A new National Petascale Computing Facility was built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road. This facility houses Blue Waters and other NCSA computing, networking, and data systems. The 88,000-square-foot (8,200 m2) building has a 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m2) machine room. The facility has been certified LEED Gold.[6] The facility makes use of the university's campus-wide water cooling system and additional on-site cooling towers that will take advantage of the low temperatures in Illinois during the winter months to help reduce energy consumption. The building was designed using complex fluid dynamic models to optimize the cooling system. Energy efficiency at the data center is estimated to be in the 85–90% range, far superior to the 40% efficiency typically seen in large data centers.[7]
