In what is believed to be the first time a data center has been throttled back, staff at Purdue University in Indiana have managed to save millions of hours of research time keeping their supercomputers and racks running when temperatures in the room housing their supercomputers reaches more than 90 degrees. 

In an announcement on the Purdue University news site, Purdue University high performance computing systems manager Mike Shuey said the university has now released, for other data center managers, the program used for the cooling trick. 

The university was forced to overcome the issue of data center overheating, which at times was leading to months of lost research work, according to Shuey, as the supercomputers struggled with high US temperatures. 

"Past a certain temperature, our only option has been to start shutting down racks of computers," Shuey said. "That has a ripple effect on the research efforts of the university for weeks afterwards." 

During a recent interruption in cooling, staff at the university were able to keep the data center running by slowing its computers using the program designed by Unix systems administrator Patrick Finnegan, which uses the built-in capacity of the Linux operating system to slow the machines. The program can be found at FolioDirect.net.

It works much like a power-management system in a laptop computer device, designed to reduce battery drain. It can slow down almost 8,000 processors simultaneously, according to the university. 

"We actually were a bit surprised it (the program) worked so seamlessly," Shuey said. "It's much better to have jobs run slowly for an hour than to throw away everyone's work in progress and mobilize staff to try and to fix things." 

Purdue University's supercomputers are internationally ranked by the Top500.org as being among the world's largest ÔÇô alone they create the same amount of thermal energy as 155,000 processors. This is not all the data center contains, however, it also runs robotic data storage systems, processors, other computers and computer hardware ÔÇô all which is cooled with water running at 50 degrees.

 Research undertaken at the university can take months to process, and at times when power shutdowns do occur, millions of hours of work can be lost, according to the university.