Rugged-Pod concept
Rugged POD idea emerged while I attended OCP Summit V in San Jose and re-discovered how complex a datacenter building was (I used to work during 10 years in the 90′s in HPTC area and deployed, let’s call it, a medium/big parallel computer in France, by this time a 5MW machine was very big and as the system was unique, the building could be too), and the total amount of money it does cost just to control air quality, temperature and humidity to cool down our computers.
100 M$ for a building what a waste of money even if the PUE is closed to 1, I still did not figured out if the fans included into the servers were on the right side of the equation. So I believed it was perhaps time to explore if it was doable to kill the datacenter and have computers which could run outside without buildings.
I did remembered a quick talk with my brother who worked for a huge power company in France in the power transformer area, and used to design immersived cooling technology for multi millions dollars equipment standing outside for 40 years and exhausting kW of heat. Why not applying this technology to computers ?
Since that day we are thinking and working on designing a system which will allow to have computers running without any climatic control equipement lowering carbon footprint of futur datacenters. The work you will find here is clearly research work ran by talented engineers who wants to explore new technologies to lower IT cost and ecological footprint.
Jean-Marie Verdun works in the IT industry for 20 years. During that time he participated to the expansion of various technologies including super scalar adoption for scientific computing, and he participated to the architecture, debugging and deployment of the biggest super scalar supercomputer in Europe during the first half of 2000. Since that time, he focused on system design improvement especially on power consumption, efficiency and carbon footprint.
by vejmarie | Nov 7, 2016 | Uncategorized
Our first meetup in the bay has been a success, we were happy if we have had 10 attendees and we outperformed that number. This was our first meetup in the bay, and we focused the discussion on what was RuggedPOD, where the project was coming from and analyze some use...
by vejmarie | Oct 31, 2016 | Uncategorized
We are 5 days ahead of our bay area RuggedPOD meetup, and here is the agenda we worked on. If you see any additionnal subject that you would like to cover feel free to ping me. We have extended the meetup to 30 seats as we filled up pretty quickly. As a quick...
by thomas | Oct 21, 2016 | Uncategorized
What’s up with the backplane? We are currently designing a new version of the backplane. We are doing those change in order to have more space in the POD, using less cables , more power and being more self-efficient doing our own products. Our first change is our...
by vejmarie | May 7, 2016 | Uncategorized
Hi, We just released 3D drawings of RuggedPOD on github https://github.com/RuggedPOD/Drawings. These drawings have been made by Thomas an intern at Horizon, in less than 3 weeks using FreeCAD v0.16, just released under Ubuntu. It is at the same level of content than...
by vejmarie | Apr 4, 2016 | Simulation
Calculix is great Finite Element Mechanical simulation tools which support various solvers. We intend to use it as to validate mechnical structure of RuggedPOD and Open Tower. Following this goal, we ended up to recompile it under MacOS, and Linux, as to support most...
by vejmarie | Mar 20, 2016 | Uncategorized
Following the need we have to use open software technology to sustain our community growth, we have worked on building up a version of FreeCAD on Mac OS X to test the software and help FreeCAD community to improve it as to be able to design RuggedPOD with it. The FEM...
by vejmarie | Feb 23, 2016 | Uncategorized
Horizon Computing Solution, one of our core sponsor, joins the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) initiated by Facebook along with major other members of the mobile ecosystem like Nokia, Intel Corporation, Deutsche Telekom. The TIP aims to redefine the current approach to...
by vejmarie | Feb 14, 2016 | Uncategorized
While being an Open Hardware Project, RuggedPOD is heavily designed with expensive efficient prorietary softwares, including Solidworks, Flotherm, or Altium designer, which has been dropped to the benefit of upverter. As a community willing to expand and accept any...
by vejmarie | Jan 26, 2016 | Uncategorized
We just released an easy to print 3D model of the OpenTower project. You can have a preview of it there http://ruggedpod.qyshare.com/?page_id=1407 , and download STL from http://ruggedpod.qyshare.com/3D/tower directory by adding filename at the end with spaces...
by vejmarie | Jan 22, 2016 | Uncategorized
This concept is perhaps the winning one, as it is strong, scalable and can use plenty of various raw material, even a mix of them, like concrete, wood, or galvanized steel. We believe that using a spiral stairway as a “building” core is a good approach to...