09/02/2024 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Supercomputers, Tesla Supercluster, Meta Sustainability Report, CoreWeave
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
[Link] Data Center Frontier: Sabey Data Centers has been chosen to be the colocation partner for the next-generation Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the site of the next-generation Horizon supercomputer. Campus stats: 84 MW; 430,000 square feet; 100kW per cabinet.
[Link] Elon Musk posted an impressive video on X of the data center housing Cortex, the Tesla AI training supercluster. Contained cold aisles, cardboard signs for aisle markers, and probably a mix of NVIDIA H100’s and Tesla’s own Dojo chips. I think I need a road trip to Austin.
[Link] On my way to Austin, I think I need to stop in Oak Ridge, TN to see the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Published in Future Generation Computing Systems a new study from ORNL examines potential strategies to integrate quantum computing with the world’s most powerful supercomputing systems in the pursuit of science. “It’s kind of a manifesto for how we propose to dive as a laboratory into this new era of computing,” said co-author Rafael Ferreira da Silva, a senior research scientist for ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences. The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility houses the Frontier Supercomputer.
[Link] The HPC Debrief had an interesting interview with James Walker, CEO of Nano Nuclear Energy. Mr. Walker talks about the company's innovative approach to providing power for data centers through microreactors. NANO Nuclear’s products in technical development are “ZEUS”, a solid core battery reactor, and “ODIN”, a low-pressure coolant reactor, each representing advanced developments in clean energy solutions that are portable, on-demand capable, advanced nuclear microreactors. Nano recently announced a new 14,000 square foot facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to house their Nuclear Technology Headquarters.
Meta
[Link] Meta released a lot of interesting data in the recently released 2024 Sustainability Report. 1,243,306MWh of electricity was used at its Altoona, Iowa data center campus; second only to the Prineville, Oregon campus. The company said usage overall in 2023 was 14,975,435MWh, and 100 percent was from renewable energy (via PPAs and RECs).
[Link] Meta is set to launch a new data center in Graniteville, South Carolina. The 715,000-square-foot campus will represent a more than $800 million investment, its first in the state.
[Link] Meta announced a deal with Sage Geosystems to use its new proprietary Geopressured Geothermal System (GGS) to provide carbon-free power for its data centers.
[Link] CNBC had an interesting video: How Data Centers Became Hot Real Estate Investments
[Link] Data center firms Chirisa and PowerHouse are partnering with asset manager Blue Owl for a multi-billion-dollar joint venture to build data centers for AI cloud firm CoreWeave. The first stage of the JV will provide the capacity to deploy up to $5 billion for turnkey build-to-suit AI/HPC data centers.
[Link] Swedish colocation provider EcoDataCenter also announced a partnership with CoreWeave. As part of its European expansion strategy, CoreWeave will leverage thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, all interconnected with ultra-fast NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking.
[Link] T5 Data Centers announced plans to expand its Atlanta footprint with the development of a new 300MW data center campus in South Fulton County, Georgia.
[Link] AWS announced the general availability of AWS Parallel Computing Service, to make it easy to build clusters using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances, low-latency networking, and storage optimized for HPC workloads.
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