Search

The INFN Tier1 data center is currently located in the premises of the Physics Department of the University of Bologna, where CNAF is also located. During 2023 it will be moved to the “Tecnopolo”, the new facility for research, innovation, and technological development in the same city area; the same location is also hosting Leonardo, the pre-exascale supercomputing machine managed by CINECA, co-financed as part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, 4th ranked in the top500 November 2022 list. The construction of the new CNAF data center consists of two phases, corresponding to the computing requirements of LHC: Phase 1 involves an IT power of 3 MW, and Phase 2, starting from 2025, involves an IT power up to 10 MW. The new data center is designed to cope with the computing requirements of the data taking of the HL-LHC experiments, in the time spanning from 2026 to 2040 and will provide, at the same time, computing services for several other INFN experiments and projects, not only belonging to the HEP domain. The co-location with Leonardo opens wider possibilities to integrate HTC and HPC resources and the new CNAF data center will be tightly coupled with it, allowing access from a single entry point to resources located at CNAF and provided by the supercomputer. Data access from both infrastructures will be transparent to users. In this presentation we describe the new data center design, providing a status update on the migration, and we focus on the Leonardo integration showing the results of the preliminary tests to access it from the CNAF access points.

The accurate calculation of the power usage effectiveness (PUE) is the most important factor when trying to analyse the overall efficiency of the power consumption in a big data center. In the INFN CNAF Tier-1 a new monitoring infrastructure, also known as Building Management System (BMS), has been recently implemented using the Schneider StruxureWare™ Building Operation (SBO) software. During the design phase of this new BMS, a great attention was given to the possibility of collecting several detailed information about the electric absorption of specific devices and parts of the facility. Considering the annual trends and the demands for reducing the operating costs it became clear that some improvements were certainly needed in the very short time. For this reason, a hardware upgrade of the cooling chillers and related chilled water pumps distribution system was seriously considered using innovative cooling technology. We focused on chillers using the Danfoss Turbocor centrifugal compressors technology that uses magnetic levitation and an oil-free approach for obtaining the best efficiency. Subsequently, we studied a solution that could easily compensate the initial investment during the first years of usage (considering the Total Cost of Ownership of the project) and that will improve the overall PUE of our data center.