Tremendous interest in the Open Data Center Day at the Green IT Cube of FAIR and GSI
16.12.2024 |
For the second time, GSI/FAIR invited visitors to the Open Data Center Day (Tag der offenen Rechenzentren, TdoRZ) in November.A total of 60 interested people on four tours were given the opportunity to take a look inside the high-performance computing center Green IT Cube on campus.
What does a data center actually look like from the inside? On the "Open Data Center Day," the Green IT Cube opened its doors, inviting visitors to take a look behind the scenes and learn about the complex operations and importance of the data center for GSI and FAIR. Numerous technology enthusiasts and experts took the opportunity to experience the center up close and gain insight into how the immense volumes of data from GSI/FAIR’s physical experiments are processed. The towering rows of server racks and the background hum made a particular impression, giving visitors a tangible sense of the infrastructure’s capacity and significance.
The Green IT Cube is an environmentally friendly high-performance data center with a special cooling system. The generated heat is dissipated through water cooling on the racks’ back doors and supplies an adjacent canteen and office building with heat. By dispensing with complex cooling of the high-volume room air and instead using an innovative water cooling system, the energy required for cooling is reduced to about one tenth compared to conventional data centers (Power Usage Effectiveness PUE≈1.07). With half the floor height, the computer cabinets can be arranged much more densely, as in a high-bay warehouse, which reduces investment costs. For its special environmental friendliness, the Green IT Cube received, among other awards, the Blue Angel, the Federal German Government's eco label.
The Green IT Cube at GSI is mainly used to store and process measurement data from physical experiments with the particle accelerator and for simulations. It will also provide the necessary capacity for the future research center FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research), which is currently being built at GSI. Furthermore, it hosts the so-called Digital Open Lab, a living laboratory that provides an environment for the development, testing and upscaling of energy-efficient high-performance computing to the scale of industrial demonstrators.
The TdoRZ is the highlight of the awareness campaign “Where does the Internet actually live?”, which was initiated by the German Datacenter Association (GDA), the representative body for the data center industry in Germany. 13 data centers in Germany opened their doors. During guided tours, interested visitors had the opportunity to find out what goes on in data centers and what central importance they have for modern life. (CP)
Further information
- Report about TdoRZ in the hessenschau (from 12:26 min, German)
