SciNet Client Reference Video

SciNet had a limited amount of funding and we wanted to maximize the total computing power that we could get out of it and because of the scale of this project we fairly quickly realized we even had to design and build a completely new datacenter.

Video Transcript

IBM iDataplex

[0:03] The largest iDateplex implementation on the Planet

[0:07] Thirty Thousand Intel Xeon 5500 Cores

[0:14] Sixty TeraBytes of RAM

[0:17] Three hundred TeraFLOPs of computing power.

[0:20] One hundred and seventy TeraFlops sustained computing performance

[0:25] One of the largest Intel and Intel Xeon implementations on the Planet

Chris Loken, PhD, Chief Technical Officer
SciNet

[0:32] SciNet’s mission is to provide high performance computing resources for the researchers at the University of Toronto, the affiliated research hospitals, there are ten of them, and in fact to researchers across Canada.

[0:45] SciNet had a limited amount of funding and we wanted to maximize the total computing power that we could get out of it and because of the scale of this project we fairly quickly realized we even had to design and build a completely new datacenter.


Keith Beddard, Senior Managing Consultant
IBM Canada

[1:02] SciNet was looking for a very green, very energy efficient facility on a very energy efficient system.

Amit Gupta, Advisory Project Manager
IBM Canada

[1:09] IBM team which actually sat down and designed a datacenter which would meet these requirements.


Keith Beddard

[1:16] Together IBM and SciNet were able to craft no just the system in the computers but the entire infrastructure into a very energy efficient facility.

Chris Loken

[1:24] iDataplex’s design is very innovative and what it has done primarily is that saved space and saved power. Scalability is critical because SciNet will have four thousand servers in fact in high performance computing applications what you want to be able to do is to run a single job, a single application across the entire system and to run a single job across thirty thousand cores or four thousand servers is something that very few people have ever done.

Chris Loken

[1:57] Our preliminary testing right now on the newest Intel Xeon processor shows the Intel processor is winning by 25% as compared to some of the others. The key advantage that SciNet saw in this latest Xeon processor is the much improved memory bandwidth. Now this is really important for high performance computing applications because we typically move a lot of data from the processors to the RAM and back again.

Keith Beddard

[2:20] The fact that the Xeon 5500is so energy efficient and we can get so many computing FLOPS out of a watt of energy is really important to IBM and to the customer .

Amit Gupta

[2:34] The datacenter is state of the art in the sense it used only chilled water for all its cooling.

[2:43] What we have done in this datacenter is used mostly free cooling. In 5 months out of the year we aren’t going to be using any mechanical equipment to cool this water. All we are doing is using the atmospheric conditions to cool the water down to a temperature that is acceptable to the computers and that is all the energy we are using, it is just off the atmosphere. Just pumps and water and the atmosphere that’s all.

Chris Loken

[3:09] This SciNet project is almost the poster child for this green type of initiative. We knew early on that we had to be very careful with our power budget and we had to design a datacenter that was extremely efficient. And what IBM has done is that they have come up with a new innovative design for this datacenter which minimizes the amount of power that is needed for the cooling. The fact the rear door heat exchanger on the iDataplex is able to actually cool the room itself and the combination of all these things gives us a highly efficient datacenter in fact it very well be one of the most power efficient datacenters in the World.