NOAA put the cart before the horse to some degree when purchasing a new supercomputer to track hurricanes.

Because they were packed to the rafters at their existing data centers, NOAA built a new center to house this new 383 TF box. However, since they hadn’t awarded the contract for the system yet, they didn’t know exactly what to design into the new building. This article outlines a few of the choices they made and provides some interesting details. (See below…)

The first fun fact is that they have enough power capacity to handle up to 33 watts per rack – which is fairly generous by today’s standards. They’re going to use outside air cooling for roughly 40% of the year and traditional chillers to handle the rest of the load. This is going to save roughly $800K annually in energy costs.

Part of this savings arises from the use of rear-door liquid cooling on some, but not all, of the racks. What caught my eye was their use of a 32-foot tall ‘thermal storage tank’ that will hold 25,000 gallons of 55°F water.

This vast amount of cold water will provide only about 10 minutes of emergency cooling in case of a power outage or chiller failure. I’d expect that this ‘cold battery’ would provide a bit more than 10 minutes of cooling, but perhaps this estimate is assuming a pump failure as well.