Computing center in a box

Photo: John Weisskopf, SLAC

Computing center in a box
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's newest computing center arrived in a standard 20-foot-long shipping container.

But nobody had to worry about pulling a muscle unpacking it. A crane lifted the 23,340 pound container off a flatbed truck and carefully placed it on a concrete pad behind the computing building.

Once hooked up to power, cooling water, and networking cables, it became a self-contained data center with 252 servers, expanding the lab's scientific computing capacity by one-third.

SLAC is the first customer to test Sun Microsystems' self-contained computer center, known as Project Blackbox. Randy Melen, leader of the lab's high-performance storage and computing team, says it was the answer to the question, “How do you extend your data center without too much pain?”

Doors at each end of the insulated shipping container open onto a center aisle that looks like a hall of mirrors, lined with shiny silver panels. Racks of computing equipment are hidden behind the panels and can be pulled out into the aisle for maintenance.

One thing: SLAC's Blackbox is not black. It was painted white, to stay cooler in the California sun.

Heather Rock Woods