[Beowulf] Caption Competition

Mark Hahn hahn at mcmaster.ca
Mon Jun 18 08:39:12 PDT 2012


> http://regmedia.co.uk/2012/06/17/ibm_sequoia_llnl.jpg
>
> There must be some funny caption for this!

"do these cables clash with my safety vest?"
"as you can see, your DC TCO will improve once you hire cabling gnomes."
"down here is where we store the pron."
"since this cluster will melt the polar icecaps, it's built on stilts!"

> As an aside, are those very deep false floors?

we have a location with a raised floor of ~4 ft.  I'm not sure how 
that was chosen, but I also can't think of any reason why not.
I mean, in general, raised floors are a chilled air plenum,
so it's clearly good to avoid narrow ones.  (the DC I set next to 
has about 16", and 2-8" of that is consumed by cables.)

in general, I would advocate engineering DCs with as unobstructed 
airflow for both hot and cold as possible, and trying hard to keep
cables out of the way of either.  I'd love to see some CFD simulations
of alternative DC layouts.  for instance is it a good design to have
no raised floor, but sealed H/C aisles fed by separate sets of ducts?
how about a "linear" DC, where there is just a row of chillers aligned 
with a single row of racks?



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