Behind the scenes of Big Data — Green IT Cube of GSI/FAIR again hosts Open Data Center Day
13.11.2025 |
On the occasion of Open Data Center Day (TdoRZ), 78 participants and two school classes took the opportunity to visit the Green IT Cube high-performance data center on the GSI/FAIR campus. Guided tours allowed them a look at the data center's particularly sustainable and energy-efficient technology and informed them about its scientific applications.
Guests interested in technology experienced the data center up close and got an impression of how the immense amounts of data from physical experiments are processed. At the same time, they learned about the innovative technology of the Green IT Cube, which has already won numerous awards and has been recognized with the Blue Angel, the German government's environmental label, for its environmental friendliness.
The Green IT Cube uses a special cooling system in which the generated heat is dissipated through water cooling on the racks’ back doors, and supplies heat to the adjacent office and canteen building. By dispensing with complex cooling of the high-volume room air and instead using an novel water cooling system, the energy required for cooling is reduced to about one tenth compared to conventional data centers (Power Usage Effectiveness PUE≈1.07). At half the floor height, the computer cabinets can be arranged much more densely, as in a high-bay warehouse, which reduces investment costs.
A new type of system for direct water cooling of the processors, known as direct liquid cooling, has also recently been added to the operation, using a solution from German cooperation partner Rittal. It dissipates heat, particularly from graphics cards (GPUs) specially designed for AI calculations — a joint technological blueprint for scalable IT infrastructure for growing AI applications in research, the digital economy, and industry.
The Green IT Cube at GSI is mainly used to store and process measurement data from physical experiments with the particle accelerator and for simulations. It will also provide the necessary capacity for the future research center FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research), which is currently under construction at GSI. Furthermore, it hosts the so-called Digital Open Lab. The living laboratory is used by external partners from science and industry as an environment for the development, testing and upscaling of energy-efficient high-performance and AI computing to the scale of industrial demonstrators.
The TdoRZ was organized for the third time under the motto “Where does the Internet actually live?!” by the German Datacenter Association (GDA), the interest group representing the data center industry in Germany. 24 data centers from 18 operators in Germany opened their doors. Interested visitors had the opportunity to take guided tours to learn about the function of data centers and their importance for modern life. (CP)
