HPC Power and Cooling: Amps

Dell’s John Fragalla is out with Part III of his post on HPC Power and Cooling, this time talking about how to best provision for cluster amperage. The overall focus of this piece is that HPC system design is as much about determining the overall power and cooling aspects as it is about processors, interconnect, and IO.

In some cases, depending on the amps per rack, one might need multiple rack PDUs per rack to balance the load across circuit breakers and phases to ensure, under peak load when running Linpack, no breakers are exceeding the maximum specification.

In Part 4, John will cover Cubic Feet per Minute (CFM), which is a measurement of air flow a HPC system produces from component fans.