February 27, 2024 — On February 23, 2024, a new data center was opened at CERN’s Prevessan site in France, marking the completion of a major project in CERN’s computing strategy. Spread over 6,000 square meters, the center includes six rooms for IT equipment, each with 2 MW of cooling capacity, and CPU servers for physical data processing, as well as for business continuity and disaster recovery. It also hosts a small amount of CPU server and storage capacity for (e.g. in case of data corruption). CERN’s main data center at Maylinsite will continue to house the majority of the organization’s data storage capacity.
The data generation rate of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) continues to increase and has already reached approximately 45 petabytes per week, which is a major step forward in the era of CERN’s current major upgrade, the High Luminosity LHC. is expected to double. Main force accelerator, LHC. Data from these experiments will be fed into the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), a collaboration of approximately 170 data centers distributed in more than 40 countries, with approximately 3 exabytes of storage capacity and 100 It has 10,000 CPU cores. While the Meyrin data center has previously played a Tier 0 role, i.e. the core of the LHC computing grid, the Prevesan center will provide significant additional computing power to his CERN.
The new building was constructed in a record time of less than two years. It meets strict technical requirements to ensure environmental sustainability and is equipped with an efficient heat recovery system that contributes to the heating of the buildings on the Prevesan site.
Data centers, the backbone of our interconnected world, are energy-intensive infrastructure. According to a recent report, their energy consumption accounts for about 1.5% of the European Union’s total electricity consumption. Two parameters that characterize the environmental sustainability of data centers are power usage efficiency (PUE) – the ratio of the data center’s total input power to IT load power – and water usage efficiency (WUE) – the ratio of water usage in the data It’s a ratio. Energy consumption of center systems and IT equipment.
The new Prevesan Center has a PUE target of 1.1, which is lower than the world average of 1.6 and closer to 1.0. This would be the value for a fully efficient data center where all power is supplied to the IT equipment.
Thanks to our innovative water recycling system, we have a WUE target of 0.379 liters per kWh. The cooling system will automatically start when the outside temperature reaches 20℃. Five giant fan walls in each room ensure that the overall temperature never exceeds 32 degrees Celsius.
The new center will be designed, constructed and operated within the FIDIC (International Federation of Consulting Engineers) Gold Book contract framework, ensuring financial sustainability. The building’s IT rooms will be equipped in stages with up to 78 racks each. Starting with the rooms on the top floor, the facilities will be expanded over the next 10 years.
Source: Antonella del Rosso, CERN
