April 24, 2024
CERN: Balancing Technical Excellence and Environmental Performance
Last month, our teams were in Prévessin (01) for the inauguration ceremony of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. An important milestone in CERN’s pursuit of scientific excellence!
Located on both sides of the French-Swiss border, CERN is one of the most prestigious European particle physics laboratories. Founded in 1954, its technologies are used in the healthcare sector for diagnostics, imaging, and therapy, as well as in computing and simulations.
This infrastructure relies on a comprehensive set of industrial equipment consisting of a particle accelerator complex, a global computing grid, a high-capacity computing facility, and two data centers. Data centers are regularly criticized for their high energy consumption. They account for 1.5% of the European Union’s total electricity consumption.
CERN’s new data center was designed and deployed by a consortium led by teams from Equans France. Our experts were involved from the project’s design phase to optimize the sizing of the facilities and guide all suppliers toward a sustainable approach. The data center’s capacity will be essential to support the growth in data generated by the fundamental research institute’s experiments.
A State-of-the-Art Data Center for Global Research
The goal of this project is to combine high scientific performance, consistent efficiency, and a low environmental impact.
To ensure an uninterrupted power supply to the system, the servers are powered by two separate power lines, which take over from one another in the event of a malfunction, thereby ensuring service continuity. Redundancy is crucial, as even the slightest outage can trigger a chain reaction of failures and disrupt the proper operation of the equipment.
The heat generated by the computer servers is recovered to heat other buildings. A digital monitoring system complements energy efficiency efforts by controlling the equipment and its power consumption. It enables the rapid detection of malfunctions or excessive power consumption.
Living on Air and Fresh Water: A Global Plan for Energy Conservation
Living on Air and Fresh Water: A Comprehensive Plan for Energy Conservation
As CERN’s primary means of energy optimization, the Prévessin-Moëns data center uses “dry coolers” for cooling. This innovative equipment eliminates the need for energy-intensive chillers by harnessing a resource that is both local and inexhaustible: the relatively cool air temperature of the Ain region! Comprising eight adiabatic drycoolers (16 MWf)—each approximately 12 meters long and 4 meters high—the cooling system operates with redundancy and features a temperate water loop that can vary between 22°C and 32°C. In practice, the data center’s dry coolers use outside air to cool the closed-loop water system, which ensures the servers remain cool and their electronic components function properly. During the summer, when the outside air temperature exceeds 22°C, the dry coolers switch to “wet mode.” Water trickles over damp cardboard sheets, which in turn cool the water loop through evaporation. To further reduce the data center’s water consumption, the runoff water from the dry coolers is collected in trays, enabling water consumption to be kept below 0.331 L/kWh IT. In each room, five massive ventilation walls, called “fanwalls,” distribute the cool air and ensure that the overall target temperature—set at 26°C by CERN—never exceeds 32°C.
Focus on PUE: The Energy Efficiency Metric
PUE is a metric that represents the ratio of the total annual electrical energy consumed by the facility—including that used to cool its servers—to the electrical energy consumed by the servers themselves.
More modern and energy-efficient, the new data center’s facilities will be monitored for one year to ensure that CERN achieves a PUE of less than 1.15—an unprecedented achievement in the industry! In the 2000s, the facility’s total energy demand was nearly twice that required solely for processing and storing data on the servers.
This unprecedented achievement is due to a combination of solutions deployed by experts at Equans France: the installation of highly efficient cooling and air-conditioning systems in data centers, the deployment of next-generation servers capable of operating at high temperatures of 26°C (with a tolerance up to 32°C), and an energy monitoring tool.
During the ceremony, Yves Nussbaum, Director of the Industrial Market at Equans France, stood alongside Professor Joachim Mnich, Director of Research and Computing, Enrica Porcari, Head of the Information Technology Department at CERN, and Aurélie Charillon, mayor of Prévessin-Moëns.
Equans is proud to contribute its expertise to enhance the operational and energy performance of a building that serves as a showcase for international scientific research. This data center’s commitment to excellence aligns with Equans’ shared ambition with CERN to develop facilities that are resource-efficient, energy-efficient, environmentally responsible, and focused on the circular economy. Vincent Itier, Project Director at Equans France
We are proud to provide the research community with a high-precision data center capable of reconciling environmental sustainability with scientific discovery. This pioneering project reaffirms CERN’s ambition through a truly sustainable high-tech approach. Wayne Salter, Head of the Facilities Group in CERN’s IT Department
