Janus: co-designing HPC systems and facilities

The design and procurement of supercomputers may require months, but the construction of a facility to house a supercomputer can extend to years. This paper describes the design and construction of a Top-50 supercomputer system and a fully-customized pre-fabricated facility to house it. The use of a co-design process reduced the time from conception to delivery to three months, commensurate with the amount of time it currently takes to deliver the computer system alone. Moreover, the facility was designed to provide efficient datacenter space for a 15-year lifespan. The design targets an expected yearly average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.2, with a measured PUE of 1.1 to date. Leveraging the rapid deployment technologies in use by industry allowed the procurement of the complete environment, including the facility and the resource, in significantly less time than a machine room renovation and years less than a new building.