Thinking Inside the Box

Conference · Fri Nov 16 04:00:00 EST 2007

OSTI ID:920012

Boeheim, Charles T

In early 2007, SLAC was faced with a shortage of both electrical power and cooling in the main computer building, at the same time that the BaBar collaboration needed a new cluster of 250 batch machines installed. A number of different options were explored for the expansion. Provision of additional electrical power to the building was estimated to take one to two years, and cost several million dollars; additional cooling was even worse. Space in a Silicon Valley co-location facilities was reasonable on a one-year timescale, but broke even in costs by the end of three years, and were more expensive after that. There were also unresolved questions about the affects of additional latency from an offsite compute cluster to the onsite disk servers. The option of converting existing experimental hall space into computer space was estimated at one year, with uncertain availability. An option to aggressively replace several existing clusters with more power-efficient equipment was studied closely, but was disruptive to continued operations, expensive, and didn't provide any additional headroom. Finally, the installation of a Sun Project Blackbox (PBB) unit was selected as providing the capacity on a timescale of six months for a reasonable cost with minimal disruption to service. SLAC obtained and installed a beta unit and have been running it in production since September 2007. The experiences described are with the Early Access version of the PBB. The production version of the box has engineering changes based in part on our experiences.

• Research Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-76SF00515
• OSTI ID: 920012
• Report Number(s): SLAC-PUB-12986
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS
AVAILABILITY
CAPACITY
COMPUTERS
COOLING
COOLING SYSTEMS
COST
Computing
COMP
POWER SUPPLIES
PRODUCTION
SHORTAGES
STANFORD LINEAR ACCELERATOR CENTER