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| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Sgl INN | | | | | | SGI" Altix" ICE: Achieving Unprecedented Power and Cooling Efficiency in High Performance Professional computing | | | | | | | | | | | | | | >GI introduces SGI Altix ICE, a high density integrated blade platform that offers a revolutionary ew approach to scale-out high performance computing |HPC). SGI Altix ICE provides breakthrough liability, manageability, reliability, and price/performance without the compromises inherent in лапу traditional HPC systems. Of particular note, SGI Altix ICE incorporates SGI's innovative power nd cooling solutions, for unprecedented efficiencies in the data center. | | | | | | | | | The Crisis in the Data Center Today's data centers are in a state of crisis. AFCOM's Data Center Institute predicts power failures and power unavailability will halt IT operations at more than 90% of companies over the next 5-years.1 An industry survey by Data Center Users' Group (http://www.datacenterug.org/) further projects that 96 percent of existing data centers will run out of capacity by 2011.2 Built years ago for a very different computing environment, many data centers today suffer severely from limited power and cooling capacity. The growing predominance of clusters in scale-out computing has been one of the main factors precipitating the crisis. Their rampant growth is overwhelming data center capacity. The environmental inefficiencies of traditional clusters (low density, combined with high power and cooling requirements), barely noticeable on a small scale, become prohibitive when scaling larger installations. SGI Altix ICE Power and Cooling Solutions The design of the SGI Altix ICE platform takes into account the environmental constraints of today's data centers and offers high efficiency solutions to meet the challenges. SGI has long been a technological leader in solutions optimizing power and cooling efficiency, mostly recently with its innovative SGI® Altix® 4700 server platform, where it introduced both a power architecture featuring 90% efficiency power supply units and a new generation of its field-proven water-based cooling system. These Innovations have now been further optimized and applied to SGI Altix ICE. Together, they represent a major advance in overcoming the constraints of the data center. | | | | | | | | | | High Efficiency Power SGI Altix ICE utilizes 90% efficiency redundant power supplies that transform AC voltage directly to 12VDC. These high efficiency power supplies are combined with other high efficiency components to minimize losses throughout the entire power architecture. This high level of efficiency results in average electrical savings of 33%, or $21k annually per 10 teraflops of compute power,3 compared to more typical cluster implementations. If data center facility infrastructure efficiency is also considered, the annual electrical savings doubles to $42k per 10 teraflops of compute power. Data center infrastructure efficiency, commonly described by Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) = {Total Facilities Power / IT Equipment Power}, is typically 2.0 but ranges from 1.6 to 3.0 or higher.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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