Facility
A machine the scale of Blue Waters introduces special concerns with regards to cooling and power. A new National Petascale Computing Facility was built at the University of Illinois at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road. This new facility houses Blue Waters and other NCSA computing, networking, and data systems. The 88,000-square-foot (8,200 m2) building has a 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m2) machine room. The facility will be LEED certified. The facility makes use of the university's campus-wide water cooling system and additional on-site cooling towers that will take advantage of the cold temperatures in Illinois during the winter months to help reduce energy consumption. The building was designed using complex fluid dynamic models to optimize the cooling system. Energy efficiency at the data center is estimated to be in the 85%-90% range, far superior to the 40% efficiency typically seen in large data centers.
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Famous quotes containing the word facility:
“Virtue rejects facility to be her companion.... She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom—it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“In progress of time, when my mind was, as it were, strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian æther, I could, with much more facility and exactness, carry in my memory and commit to paper the exuberant variety of his wit and wisdom.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)