“WE HAD LIMITED SPACE, POWER AND COOLING. GRC’S TECH MADE IT POSSIBLE TO ADD CAPACITY IN A STORAGE AREA, WHILE REDUCING POWER REQUIREMENTS BY 30%.”
Installation Details
- Location: Barcelona, Spain
- Industry: Academic
- Capacity (in MW): Undisclosed
- Energy Savings: 30% reduction in power requirements
- Highlight: Zero water consumption by using dry coolers instead of evaporative cooling towers
The Challenge
Port d’Informació Científica (PIC) in Barcelona, Spain is a tier-1 data center for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and requires a heavy kilowatt load to process the petabytes of constantly streaming data. Besides a high IT load and limited physical space of the data center, PIC also wanted to be environmentally conscious by conserving the excessive water usage associated with traditional air cooling.
The GRC Solution
PIC opted to install GRC’s patented immersion cooling system to answer all three concerns. Immersion cooling not only supports up to 50kW of IT load per rack in limited space environments, but also completely eliminated water consumption by using dry coolers instead of traditional evaporative cooling towers, all while reducing power requirements by 30%
Results
By installing the ICEraQ® system, PIC realized these benefits:
- Zero water consumption
- Zero cooling failures
- Zero server failures
- Added data storage capacity in an already limited space
- 30% reduction in power requirements
Testimonials:
“We had limited space, power and cooling. GRC’s technology made it possible to add capacity in a storage area, while reducing power requirements by 30%.”
— Vanessa Acin Portella, IT Team Leader at PIC
About Port d’Informació Científica (PIC):
Created in 2003, PIC is a joint undertaking of the Spanish and Catalan governments through CIEMAT and IFAE. PIC has been designated by the Spanish government as its LHC Tier-1 centre, and it is the main (Tier-0) data centre for the MAGIC telescope and the PAU dark energy survey. PIC is also a Scientific Data Center for the EUCLID satellite of the European Space Agency and is ramping up its support for the next-generation Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). PIC maintains a transversal innovation activity with many significant results over the years, related to software, hardware, monitoring and energy efficiency.
