Exascale systems are expensive, but for labs retrofitting existing facilities for novel cooling, computers, storage, networking and software are just the beginning of the high cost.
When Exa-scale supercomputers are announced, everyone focuses on the cost and capabilities of the machines themselves, but plant-controlled power and cooling, especially on the Exa-scale, is a big part of the budget, both from a design and operational perspective.
Consider the Los Alamos National Laboratory with an existing large fleet of classified and unclassified systems housed in its Strategic Computing Center. The lab already has a pre-exascale machine, Trinity, in the facility and will soon be adding an actual exascale-enabled machine, the Crossroads supercomputer, which will be about four times more powerful than Trinity.
The preparation for Crossroads from the point of view of power supply and cooling required massive investments, which were forecast at around 100 million US dollars in the budget request in 2018. The project is now complete and will be recognized this week by the US Secretary of Energy for completing the renovation ten months early and falling short of budget by $ 20 million.
The construction project for electricity and cooling called ECCCE (Exascale Class Computing Cooling Equipment) forms the stage for the upcoming HPE / Cray Crossroads machine and will serve as the basis for future machines that will be housed in the 300,000 square meter building 91 US dollars cost millions to build over twenty years ago.
The installed cooling towers and equipment for the exascale-class computer cooling equipment project at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The construction of ECCE included building new cooling towers and other structures for the center. The goal was to double the hot water cooling capacities and pave the way for an additional fleet of systems beyond crossroads, all of which support the laboratory’s NNSA guidelines.
The open-cell cooling towers from ECCE cool the water through evaporation and, according to the goals of the laboratory, should provide at least 13.4 metawatts of additional hot water cooling via five additional open cooling towers north of the existing towers. This includes adding large diameter pipes around the building and adding more pumps and heat exchangers. The original budget of nearly $ 100 million also included a range of electrical and mechanical devices to support this new cooling cycle.
“For the ECCCE project, 5,200 tons of cooling capacity had to be brought into our strategic data center,” says Kathye Segala, Associate Laboratory Director for Capital Projects in Los Alamos. “This successful project has considerably improved the high-performance computing capability of the laboratory and thus also the nuclear deterrent in our country far into the future.
LANL2 Installed tower tubes, process tubes, heat exchangers and basket screens for the Exascale-class computer cooling project at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Other national labs are making similar preparations for exascale machines or have already made the investments during their pre-exascale system installations, including Oak Ridge National Lab which changed its hot water cooling prior to the arrival of the Summit supercomputer and had to add more power to it System come to power Frontier.
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