ESI Group deploys HPC Center in Paris with Minkels and Legrand

The new European HPC Center for ESI Group is located at the Teratec Campus, an ideal data centre location for launching collaborative HPC projects because of its vicinity to Europe’s largest HPC Center, the CEA’s ‘Très Grand Centre de Calcul.’ The new HPC Center will act as the company’s cloud- based software development and engineering platform serving all ESI offices across Europe.

“The ability to build an intelligent HPC data centre infrastructure able to easily adapt to ESI’s evolving needs and computational loads was of decisive importance for selecting Minkels and Legrand,” says Vincent Chaillou, COO of ESI Group. “The implementation was successfully completed on time and within budget. It now delivers a scalable, adaptable and reliable infrastructure, ready to anticipate the next big technological challenges, including Big Data evolutions and the Internet of Things.”

MINKELS LED LIGHTING

Minkels France and Legrand, in joint cooperation with Minkels’ implementation partner for the French market, Cap Ingelec, provided ESI Group with an integrated and fully customised HPC-ready data centre solution. Modularity at construction detail level makes it a highly scalable and easy-to-customise solution. The small-scale data centre, housed in a re-used building has a high-density power capacity of 20kW per rack, while reinforced metal floor slabs under the racks are installed to fit high-density equipment floor loads.

This new data centre benefits from the energy saving technologies delivered by Minkels and Legrand, reducing the ecological footprint of ESI’s activities. This suits ESI’s corporate vision of developing sustainable and environment friendly products and services. The Minkels Cold Corridor aisle containment solution deployed has an air flow optimisation package included to make sure it ’s air tight and designed to offer maximum energy efficiency. The Legrand S2S UPS and Minkels VariCondition H2O water-cooling implemented also make an impor tant contribution to this data centre’s energy-efficient characteristics.

A nice add-on delivered to ESI, in line with the company’s energy efficiency objectives, is the new Minkels LED Lighting solution. The LED tube is attached to the top of the racks and uses only 20 watts of energy while able to illuminate the room inside the Cold Corridors clearly. Each LED tube has a length of 1.20 metres. It ’s an easy-to-install solution through the use of magnetic systems and a central connection point for electricity supply.

“ESI is now equipped with a European cloud computing Point of Delivery (PoD) to run state-of-the-art calculations,” adds Mr. Chaillou. “We’re very happy with the results. It will largely contribute to our successes and engineering studies in the field of Vir tual Prototyping.”