The MEMS & Nanoelectronics Systems Packaging Center (EMNSPC) at the University of Texas at Arlington is home to an electronics cooling lab with equipment related to air cooling, complete with airflow test bench and reliability equipment such as an Environmental Chamber, Instron Tester and Failure Analysis Capability. The undergraduate and graduate students involved in the lab have access to high-performance computing and CFD tools including ANSYS packages, such as ANSYS Fluent, Workbench and Icepak, Mentor Graphics’ FloTHERM and FloVENT and Future Facilities’ 6SigmaRoom, 6SigmaET and 6SigmaRack.
Since ES2 was established, the UTA team has built two 625-square-foot data center labs complete with two 20-ton CRAC units. One of the data center laboratory houses Open Compute Hardware (donated by Facebook). In 2015, UTA received 480 servers from Yahoo! (in 2012, they donated 250 servers) and a 42U direct-to-chip liquid cooled rack from Cisco worth $1 million.
The measurement equipment in the data centers includes wired and as well as wireless temperature, humidity and pressure instrumentation. Students associated with I/UCRC also have access to thermal and reliability labs maintained by Dereje Agonafer, UTA site director for ES2. A Stereo Particle Image Velocimetry (SPIV) system housed at the Aerodynamics Research Center is available to carry out experimental flow visualization. In addition, UTA is home to a $145 million Engineering Research Lab. The facility provides approximately 234,000 square feet of space for state-of-the-art, multi-disciplinary research and teaching labs and classrooms, faculty and graduate student offices, administrative offices, conference rooms and support areas.
UTA has access to a research modular data center with a direct/indirect evaporative cooling module setup and the facilities of industrial partner, Mestex, in Dallas, TX. The research facility is operated and monitored year-round in the hot and humid Dallas climate, using only evaporative cooling or outside air free cooling. It houses four racks populated with 1U servers. Also, Facebook donated a $200K scaled direct evaporative cooling unit for research purposes complete with a 30KW heating element to represent data center heat load. The equipment is capable of drawing 5000 CFM and comes with built-in sensors and control programs.
The University of Texas at Arlington is home to the Nanotechnology Research & Teaching Facility, an interdisciplinary resource open to scientists within and outside of the university. The facility is the leading university-based nanotechnology research, development and teaching facility in north Texas.
