High-power computer sites around the UK are experiencing problems due to the unprecedented heatwave, with some equipment being shut down to avoid damage. One company says it will be building a new data centre with increased cooling capacity. The growing trend for renting powerful cloud-based computing hardware means that many others are able to carry on as usual, though.
at the University of Liverpool, UK, told 91av that some hardware at an AI firmĚýhe owns was shut down yesterday due to the heatwave. Although the company’s software that users interact with is hosted elsewhere in the cloud, the equipment at its data centre controls updates, meaning that none could take place until temperatures were safe enough to reboot the machines.
“We ran at reduced capacity and shut down completely at 16:15 after monitoring equipment temperatures,” he says.
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Murray says the company is in the process of building a new data centre that will have more cooling capacity. “We will learn from this week’s experiences.”
One IT support worker at a visual effects company in London, who asked to remain anonymous, said he had several layers of plans in place to shut equipment down depending on the maximum temperature today.
“We’ve looked over what we don’t need in our machine room and are turning it off. Some of our render machines are not likely to be used, so we’re turning them off to take the pressure off the air conditioning,” he says. “It will be a bit annoying for our teams, but can be worked around.”
“If this continues to be a problem, we will need to invest more time and money in improving machine rooms, and it might accelerate the general trend of outsourcing machine room space to either cloud providers or data centres operated by third parties,” he says.
When companies rent computer power in the cloud, those machines could be located anywhere, and are generally part of huge data centres with powerful cooling that means they can escape the effects of heatwaves, although they generate large amounts of carbon emissions in the process.
at Jellyfish Pictures, a visual effects and animation studio, says his company uses several cloud computing suppliers. “This being the case, we are not held to ransom by heatwaves in the UK,” he says.
Larger firms in the UK that operate their own data centres, such as Nvidia, which runs what was until recently the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, can also invest heavily in cooling.
at Nvidia says that the graphics processing units (GPUs) in the company’s supercomputer and other machines have built-in temperature protection. “The GPU will automatically reduce clock speed and power usage if it senses abnormally high temperatures, and eventually shuts down completely if the over-temperature condition persists,” he says.
