Engineering and Science Research Labs and Equipment
Director of Information Technologies, Watson School
ES B300, B301, B303
The Data Center consists of three rooms of 1000, 484 and 468 square feet. The rooms utilize conventional raised floor air cooling. The largest room has been outfitted with sixteen water cooled Knürr Electronics GmbH, Cooltherm 25kW equipment racks. These racks provide the primary cooling for the installed equipment. The heat energy recovered from the data center cooling system is reused to pre-heat outside air as it enters the building ventilation system.
The data center leverages both physical and virtualization technologies to offer a flexible multi-tier computing environment to support research and the computing needs of the Watson School.
The first tier is comprised of physical and general purpose virtual machines and is intended for daily computing activities.
The second tier consists of discrete servers, terminal server farms and high end graphic workstations. The servers provide a robust computational environment for modeling and simulation. The graphic workstations provide access to applications that require high end graphic capabilities. The workstations physically reside in the data center and can be accessed on a per need basis over the network via a PCoIP host card.
The third tier consists of a high performance computing cluster. The purpose of the cluster is to provide advanced simulation and modeling capabilities. Models developed in tier one and two can be expanded in this environment for further analysis and simulation. This tier uses leading edge virtualization technologies and hardware to consolidate and expand existing network resources, such as servers, desktops and data storage. Server and desktop virtualization reduces capital and operational expenses while reducing energy demands resulting in an overall long term cost reduction and commitment to green solutions.
A YouVisit panoromic view of the data center can be seen here.