University of Maryland Zaratan DataBank Deployment

By Dan Fuentes, SVP Enterprise Sales

The flagship computing cluster deployed by the university’s Division of Research in the IAD2 data center is known internally as Zaratan. The compute resources are available to any researcher on campus that has High-Performance Computing needs. Research spans the fields of astronomy, physics, biology, social sciences, and Artificial Intelligence. Scientists also used the cluster to analyze data from the Deep Impact project—where NASA crashed a satellite into a comet to determine its internal composition.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

UMD started deploying HPC clusters at the turn of the Century on Campus. The cabinets were set up to support 5kW per cabinets. The reliability of the power, along with the lack of redundancy, was causing great inefficiencies with their researchers. If the Data Center or a specific cabinet lost power off-hours the researchers would have to stop leveraging the system until support could arrive in person to fix the problem. In addition, the cooling requirements continued to rise in demand. Higher Densities were necessary. The University quickly acknowledged that a 24/7 staffed site, with the potential to deliver Liquid Cooling was a necessity.

DATABANK SOLUTION

DataBank was able to meet this demand in our IAD2 (McLean Data Center). We worked vigorously with UMD to fully understand its specific requirements. We ultimately redesigned the first floor of our Data Center to enable Liquid Cooling, and fully managed the implementation of the following:

• (392) s/f Raised floor to accommodate 20 cabinets
• 10 water-cooled cabinets for servers that handle research processing.
• 10 air-cooled cabinets for networking gear and storage devices.
• (350kW)+ power depending on the number and type of simulations researchers need to run at the same time.
• 3 dedicated 3-phase A/B/C power distribution units that provide power redundancy to the cabinets with forty 415-volt/60-amp/3-Phase/560c6W power whips.
• (2) CoolIT Chx750 coolant distribution units (CDUs) with redundant A/B power for liquid cooling.
• Aquatherm cooling loop, featuring polypropylene piping.
• Because CDUs provide most of the cooling, it takes less than one computer room air handler (CRAH) to cool the infrastructure.

BUSINESS RESULT

UMD can now:

• Feel confident in eliminating power outages because of the fully resilient DataBank Data Center
• Lean on our 24/7 support, and be confident that any issues will be addressed immediately
• Run at much higher densities than ever before, enabling 64-core CPUs in Zaratan servers to perform faster because of liquid cooling, which translates into
• much better experiences and efficient engagements for its Researchers
• Avoid the expense of staffing a Data Center since DataBank provides all DC Infrastructure
• Repurpose its on-campus Data Center
• Achieve its green initiatives.

The Zaratan High-Performance Computing infrastructure, powered and cooled by the DataBank IAD2 data center is allowing researchers at the University of Maryland to explore complex problems, engage in competitive research opportunities, and discover novel research applications.

For more information on the Zaratan/DataBank environment, please click here.