Cold Aisle Containment in our server room

On Thursday 10 March 2011, we installed a so-called Cold Aisle Containment in the server room shared by the Department of Computer Science and HIIT. This is a rustic contraption made from transparent PE plastic, air-conditioning tubes, and a great deal of duct tape. It cuts back on the need to cool the server room very efficiently, as the air-tight plastic stops the intake and exhaust air from the servers from mixing.

After: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZIuJIVYsDs
Before:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufb0PkCal2k

I videoed the setup before the change and after. The video may look like our server room is starting to resemble one of those biospheres that were popular in the 1990s. The advantage with transparent plastic as building material is that it puffs out with pressure, so now our maintenance team can monitor the cooling capacity of the computer room air conditioners (CRAC) by keeping an eye on the surface of the plastic. In this way, the CRACs will produce exactly as much cool air as the servers need.

Before installing the plastic bubbles in the server room, the CRACs were running full blast all the time. One of them pushed 15-degree (C) intake air under the floor, which became 19-21 degrees when it hit the servers because of the mixing of the air flows.At the end of our three hours of hard work this changed considerably, as the flow of exhaust air became more efficient, making work in the server room much more humane.

The intake air to the servers used to be 20 degrees, but now we need much less cooling capacity. We were able to shut down one CRAC completely and crank up two others 7 degrees. To adjust the last two devices, we need some special tools that we are still waiting for. We will continue to adjust the CRACs, as we are aiming at intake air of 22 degrees and to turn off one more CRAC unit.

Servers in the cold

In addition to optimising the server room, we have been running (other) servers outside since February 2010. At this moment, there is a 26U rack placed on the roof terrace of Exactum. It is protected from water and snow by a kind of cell. You can admire its winking lights at night in the images from the Exactum camera:

Near: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/tkt_cam/exactum_terrace.jpg
Afar:  http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/tkt_cam/exactum.jpg

We are monitoring the servers constantly, and they are part of the Folding@home calculation. In addition, anyone can ask about the inner temperatures of the servers via a Twitter feed set up to monitor them. Twitter is in a state of perpetual beta, so more features are on the way.

Twitter:      http://twitter.com/HelsinkiChamber
Folding@home: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=200947

The intake server air is not filtered in any way. The most frequently asked question is, whether the moisture condensing inside the servers harms them. However, the condensation works in reverse, since the servers are cooled by air, so they are always warmer than the air around them. The next most frequent question is whether we could build a sauna with the exhaust air from the servers. We will return to this question in the near future.

If this or any other projects seem interesting to you, you can learn more on Thursday 17 March at the event "Science in the best of company" during the demo session at 17:30-20.

 

- Researcher Mikko Pervilä

You can also follow our research in our blog at http://blogs.helsinki.fi/pervila/.

Created date

17.03.2011 - 13:35

Tsinghua Workshop - Strengthen Collaboration with Top Universities in China

 

Together with research teams in Tsinghua University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Professor Sasu Tarkoma, Prof. Yong Li, and Prof. Pan Hui organized a successful workshop on mobile big data and networking (url:http://fi.ee.tsinghua.edu.cn/2015workshop/) in September 2015.

 

 

Computational modelling sheds new light on core cell functions

An advanced computational model developed by computer scientists has revealed long delays in gene regulation.

 

The fields of genetics and genomics have developed rapidly during the past years, partly due to better computational methods. Now an international research group led by Finnish researchers has developed a new computational model, which has revealed unexpectedly long processing delays in gene expression following a regulatory signal.

Jiaheng Lu: our new Associate Professor

 

Jiaheng Lu (JL) has been nominated as a tenure-track Associate Professor in computer science for a period of five years starting on August 1, 2015. Recruiting foreign professors is an important tool in the internationalization efforts of the University, so a thorough introductory interview by the head of the Department (JP) was a must.

 

 

Petri Myllymäki to be director of HIIT

Petri Myllymäki, professor at the department, has been elected director of HIIT (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology), the joint research institute of the University of Helsinki and Aalto University, for the five-year period starting on 1 August, 2015. Petri will be following Professor Sami Kaski of Aalto University in this post. Since the post of director of HIIT is a fulltime job, Petri (PM) will be relieved of his own professorial duties for the same period, and so the head of the department (JP) saw fit to conduct an exit interview with him.