Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of June 23

mira-argonne

A look at the cabling supporting the Mira supercomputer in Argonne National Laboratory, which is the third-fastest system in the world in the latest Top 500 rankings, announced this past week. (Photo: ANL)

For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week. Enjoy!

Top 10 Supercomputers, Illustrated (June 2012) - The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well. Here’s a look at the top finishers in the latest Top 500 list, which was released Monday.

eBay: Bloom Boxes Will Power Utah Data Center - The newest eBay data center project in Utah will run entirely on power generated by fuel cells from Bloom Energy, the company said this week. The use of the Bloom Energy Servers – also known as “Bloom boxes” – will give eBay a cleaner energy profile, allowing it to power its facility with biogas rather than coal-sourced power from local utilities. Perhaps more importantly, eBay will overhaul its power infrastructure to dramatically reduce its reliance on uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units and backup generators.

Generator Fan Failure Triggered AWS Outage - Last week’s outage at Amazon Web Services was triggered by a series of failures in the power infrastructure in a northern Virginia data center, including the failure of a generator cooling fan while the facility was on emergency power. The downtime affected AWS customers Heroku, Pinterest, Quora and HootSuite, along with a host of smaller sites.

HP Picks Atom Chips for Next Phase of Project Moonshot - HP announced that for the next phase of Project Moonshot, the company’s initiative to develop extreme low-energy servers, it has chosen to lead with technology featuring the Intel Atom processor codenamed “Centerton” for its initial production system. Announced last November, HP’s Moonshot looks to leverage workload-optimized, extreme low-energy “server cartridges” in a unique enclosure that pools resources across thousands of servers.

At Structure, Sorting Out Clouds & Competition - The GigaOm Structure 2012 conference kicked off Wednesday with a power-packed lineup of leading players in cloud computing and IT infrastructure participating in panels and presentations. Here are some highlights from the conference.