As promised in previous announcements, the new EcoCloud Experimental Space is running, and experiments are underway.
The facility is located in the CCT Building, alongside the EPFL Data Center and above the campus central heating plant.
There are currently eight racks with passive rear door liquid/air exchangers. A large experimental area is dedicated to projects that target energy monitoring and different approaches to liquid cooling, with the possibility of two experimental liquid loops.
Each rack is equipped with a per-plug power monitoring system, allowing full bench marking and computing optimization.
The experimental space has an allocation 150kW of cooling for the racks and 2 * 50 kW for the experimental space.
One of the main projects that is going to be hosted in the Experimental Space is the Heating Bits project, financed by EPFL E4S. This project includes some heat recovery from the servers at a level of temperature that enhances the co-generation of electricity and/or redistribution to the central heating system. In addition, its battery system is carefully monitored so that the quantity of renewable energy is optimized, and the workload suited to the amount available.
