News and Events
This Friday's Tech Briefing - How A Computer Facility Can Also Be Green / Update on the Proposed Scientific Research Computing Facility
Please join us for this Friday's Tech Briefing --
How A Computer Facility Can Also Be Green / Update on the Proposed Scientific Research Computing Facility
Friday, December 12, 2:00 - 3:30 p.m.
Stanford is continually pursuing its mission of leadership in research, teaching and service to the community. Over time many of the foundations needed to support these tenants change. We are in the midst of one of those changes; research efforts are dramatically shifting to the use of more simulation and approximation and away from interpolation and empirical bench work.
The broader use of computers brings with it specific infrastructure issues. In particular, the number of computing systems needed to conduct research at Stanford’s scale is growing in order of magnitude terms. There is considerable economy-of-scale efficiency gained by providing the power and cooling needs in a large scale manner. The lack of a campus computing model today makes it difficult-to-impossible to understand the full cost associated with support for scientific research, even when discussing square footage allocation, costs of power and cooling, or other basic analytical questions. In addition, when considered in total, there are environmental sustainability opportunities to be leveraged through modern architectural design.
Thus while many groups are working to find ways to cut back on energy use in many dimensions, the main mission of campus, to do cutting edge research, is actually growing in the energy demand to accomplish that research.
How could a new facility actually help this predicament? It is true that we can't do any magic to limit the electrical power used by the many computers it will house, however we can do work to minimize the additional energy needed to cool and maintain those servers in an operational state.
This talk will highlight general data center concepts and illustrate some of them via features planned for the proposed Scientific Research Computing Facility (SRCF). While a data center will always be a high user of electrical energy, specific issues can be addressed which will allow the space to operate as efficiently as possible, given the computer processing load it houses.
PRESENTER: Phil Reese, IT Services
LOCATION: Turing Auditorium (Polya Hall, Room 111)
(http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=14-160)
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