The University of Pisa in Italy has selected Vertiv to help extend its existing data center infrastructure.
Vertiv will be providing critical power and cooling systems, including liquid cooling equipment, to enable the university to deploy high-performance computing (HPC) systems and Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads.
The university already has three data centers in the city of Pisa to support its activities. In 2016, it launched a project for a new "Green Data Centre" for which Vertiv provided the power and cooling infrastructure. It is this facility that the university is looking to expand for HPC applications.
This new project has been dubbed "The Hybrid Green Data Centre Expansion," and plans to use the available wing of the building while keeping the original design and user interface intact.
Maurizio Davini, CTO at the university said: "We also needed to integrate new technology elements that help to meet the growing demands of high-performance computing, while providing excellent operational flexibility. The requirements have been fully met by Vertiv, which has allowed us to keep energy costs under control for efficient management of our new data center."
Vertiv will be providing a mix of power, cooling, rack, networking, and service solutions, including four Vertiv DCC containment solutions for corridor closures.
The cooling side will feature twenty Vertiv Liebert CRV row-based cooling units and two Liebert PDX-PI direct expansion floor-mount cooling systems with variable speed compressors, as well as three Liebert XDU liquid cooling units, which control the temperature and flow of the refrigerant to the servers in a direct-to-chip application.
This has enabled the previously air-cooled data centers to become combined air and liquid-cooled.
On the power side, Vertiv is providing two Vertiv Liebert APM 500 kVA UPS systems and VRLA batteries, eight Liebert RXA switchgear units, a 400kW Power Module prefab solution, 76 Geist Switched PDUs, and 38 VR racks.
The power module, as an external power supply, enabled the expansion of the data center despite space constraints.
The University of Pisa was founded in 1343 and is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Italy.
The university is part of three EuroHPC JU projects: the Textarossa which is working towards extreme scale technologies and accelerators for the EuroHPC hw/Sw supercomputing applications for Exascale project; Admire, an adaptive multi-tier intelligent data manager for Exascale; and EUPEX, the European pilot for exascale.
It was also part of the European Processor Initiative, which was working on developing low-power processor technology for Europe's pre-exascale and exascale systems.
