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.