Monday, December 21, 2009

Why should it be Lemoniz (the Data Centre) (beta)

0- Because the place needs to be rebuilt, and accommodated as a shared space with the Basque citizines and victims of terrorism: this along with a natural reconversion of the space taken to the sea and the enhancement of Basque human progress is the best end the our society needs. Walled spaces are not something we should be proud of.

And on top of that my technical reasons:

1- Because it is a very safe place (physical): the main buildings (the reactors) are strong large and extremely safe caves that are even prepared for external impacts.
2- Because companies are interested in safe places: to host the datacenter.
3- Because caves could be rebuilt from the inside: warranting an intelligent design and reducing the amount of columns.
4- Because we need to consolidate, protect and run our computing resources to the fullest according with the latest technology and in terms of efficiency and performance.

Therefore:

-This centre and its infrastructure should be created with the agreement with the Government in Madrid, owned by Government in the Basque Country, and in partnership with industry, research and universities in the Basque Country. Lack of any of this factors would mean total failure. On the contrary, social partnership at all levels would be an unprecedented success.

And all this comes from this story.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Personnel: Critical Success Factors


"Management of such machines is sometimes highly specialized. Presently all these people work in different locations in small centres of companies and in groups of no more than two: we need to make these people share information, experience and educate them well."

Monday, December 14, 2009

Eroski Data Centre

The biggest industrial data centre in the Basque (video in Spanish):


It is called Geminis and it is located in the small city of Elorrio.
The video is from a local television technology program (teknopolis).





Read the contents in English here.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Data Center as Critical Success Factor

"Small and Medium Companies, Universities, Government and Research Centres and Companies should create a shared datacenter and working areas."

The datacentre is the kick-off HPC infrastructure. It is as critical as building a road or connecting with high speed trains or airplanes. We should stop creating small, unsafe, dangerous and unproperly PUE-ed small datacentre desings: it is time to consolidate and securize such infrastructures around the basque area. It is time to create a building infrastructure able to provide uptime, power, security at all leves, for all the science, enterprise, industry and educational actors. It is time to consolidate and build something useful and safe. The start of a HPC-Hub could be Lemoniz: better that it may seen as I already said in another post. Nevertheless I want to introduce here another good practice from Europe. Germany what a suprise.

The pictures show one of my favourites datacentres design the LRZ.



Here are the building offices and the impressive cube at the end is the datacentre itself. Each floor in there is a level of service. Elevators at the sides, stairs, from bottom to top each floor is one service: water and cooling, networking, power, backup and machine room at the top room, a space without columns (see the last picture). Impresive well design. The building includes a control room kinda space control room. Others datacentres in Europe also include such infrastructure.




Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Ideas for the future ...


If created, such centre would need to be funded in previously existing partnership with Industry. That is the key.

CIE Automotive and Simulation


This automotive company already collaborates with research centres and universities across the Basque Country.

CIE Automotive's software and research departments work with CAD, CAE and simulation tools.

It is funny coz some centres have to kill themselves to find this kinda of clients and we, in the basque, are surrounded by them ;-) perhaps because they are basque companies :-p

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Brain Drain


An HPC centre will never exist in the Basque if we keep exporting PhD graduates, due to a lack of national strategy. HPC was labeled as strategic for US industry: why is it not for the Basque ?

Friday, December 4, 2009

Mercedes-Benz CAD


Daimler Group assembles Viano and Vito vans in the Basque Country, in the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz. Around this company 5,000 employees are directly and indirectly employed.They are known users of Hyperworks from Altair for this product specifically, and much other CAx tools that I have not had time to find.

With the recession hitting hard we got great tools around to help and start creating local value: in this critical field for HPC. The Basque Automotive Industry Association represents the importance of auto industry in the basque. Recently Automobile Intelligence Centre was created, and this could also help to create a UNIX/CAD pole in the Basque Country. Local SME as providers of this multinationals could also benefit of using the HPC resources provided in a possible centre.

Iberdrola HPC

We already heard the Iberdrola -a basque based energy company- did some deals with IBM. But these engineering slides slightly detail the usage of HPC for their meteoflow processing model. As they say a private supercomputer -the largest in Spain- of 450 nodes.

Further explained here.

Yet another industrial client lost: The Basque could be providing expertise to its companies, why do we let other multinationals do that work ? Added value HPC professionals could be extremely useful for Basque Industry and could create a missing market in here. We need to rethink this.