University of Florida Data Center Infrastructure Upgrades

Summary

University of Florida’s East Campus Data Center is home to the HiPerGator AI, the nation’s most powerful university-owned supercomputer. Infrastructure upgrades were needed to provide emergency power and redundant air conditioning to the supercomputer, which is available for access across the State University System and UF Health. Moses Engineering provided the design for additional electrical capacity, CRAC AC units, UPS unit, PDUs, controls system corrections, and hot/cold containment. This project posed a challenge as the HiPerGator AI had a per row average power density that was 42% greater than the physical maximum the data center was originally designed to accept. Due to the high power density of HiPerGator AI, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used extensively on this project to ensure the proper cooling of this equipment. The result of this effort determined that if the airflow into the server areas were precisely controlled, the data center could accept this high density equipment. Moses provided N+1 redundancy on the HVAC system, upgraded the data center’s maximum per row average power density by 20%, and a fully redundant power distribution system using a ring bus.