cooling

[Bob Drzyzgula]

If the new load requires the installation of new
chillers, it could indeed cost a pile-o'-money. Even
if each node burned electricity at 100 Watts, you
are looking at 50 kW of power consumption, or about
170,000 BTU/hr, requiring about 14 tons of cooling to
remove -- your facilities folks may well be looking
at installing something like one or more Liebert
chillers such as these:
http://www.liebert.com/dynamic/displayproduct.asp?id=545&cycles=60Hz

There could well be additional shortfalls in external
heat exchanger capacity, pipe capacity out to the
heat exchangers, electric power for the computers
and for the chillers, etc. If you don't already
have the raised floor space, that could also add
quite a bit to the cost to cool all those nodes.

As to how we are making the A/C for our systems "affordable",
we do it by virtue of the HVAC budget belonging to
a different division, :-) although that also means
that we don't have *control* over that budget, and
when we hit the ceiling on cooling we kind of have
to just stop installing new equipment until the whining
and begging and pleading might eventually get us
a new chiller -- and even then we might have to give
up some rack space so there'd be a place to put it. :-(

--Bob

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 05:41:35PM -0700, Robert B Heckendorn wrote:
> 
> We are looking at the facilities issues in installing a beowulf on the
> order of 500 nodes.  What facilities is telling us is that it is going
> to almost cost us more to buy the cooling for the machine than to buy
> machine itself.  How are people making the air conditioning for their
> machines affordable?  Have we miscalculated the HVAC loads?  Are we
> being over charged?  
> 
> thanks for any guidance.
> 
> -- 
> | Robert Heckendorn                        | We may not be the only
> | heckendo at cs.uidaho.edu                   | species on the planet but
> | http://www.cs.uidaho.edu/~heckendo       | we sure do act like it.
> | CS Dept, University of Idaho             |
> | Moscow, Idaho, USA   83844-1010          |
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