Facebook’s Growing Prineville Platform
New $250 Million Building and Cutting Edge Innovations Underway
Facebook recently revealed the latest cutting-edge technology developments being nurtured at its sprawling Prineville base, as construction continues on a third, 450,000 square foot data center in an effort to keep pace with ever-expanding capacity demand.
The social media giant’s groundbreaking original facility in Crook County was unveiled some five years ago and was the first data center built and owned by Facebook — housing thousands of servers handling huge volumes of data and network traffic for hundreds of millions of clients — and led the vanguard of the industry in terms of reduced environmental impact and energy use.
The company’s commitment to operating sustainably saw innovators within the organization vigorously pursue new technologies to create one of the most energy efficient facilities of its kind in the world, while in a refreshing a spirit of camaraderie, the company shared its cutting edge building design methodologies and software advancements with the wider industry as part of the Open Commute Project.
Prineville’s cool, dry climate — ideal for evaporative cooling — was a key factor in Facebook’s decision to locate in Prineville, along with the vigorous team efforts of city, county and economic development leaders and the inclusion of incentives to help the project come to fruition.
In an ingenious project designed from inside-out, air enters the data center’s facility through a second-floor “penthouse” grill, with louvers regulating volume, before passing through a mixing room where it can be combined with server exhaust heat to regulate temperature.
The cool air then passes through a series of filters and a misting chamber to further control the temperature and humidity and continues through another filter to absorb the mist, then through a fan wall that pushes the air through openings in the floor that serve as an air shaft leading into the server area to cool custom racks, which are enclosed in a hot-aisle containment system.
Part of the beauty of the system is that there is no need for ductwork as the air goes straight down to the data hall and pressurizes the entire data center.
And as ever more users join the Facebook community, there is increasing need to expand data storage capacity and continually innovate regarding efficiency of operations, said Ken Patchett, the company’s director of Western Data Center Operations.
Part of catering to that expanded need is through the latest $250 million building under construction, which at 450,000 square feet is 100,000 square feet larger than the first data center and some 100 feet longer than a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. When complete, the expansion is likely to double the current workforce of around 165.
Patchett said, “We have been under construction in Prineville for six years and at any given time will have 250-500 construction workers on site every day, which also gives the area a significant economic boost.
“We have had a wonderful collaboration with the City of Prineville and Crook County to aid our progress and the city is in a better position due to spin-offs such as increased franchise fees which have produced a very good economic benefit that has allowed, for instance, more investment in public services.
“It was also essential for us to have adequate power and we wanted the community to grow also. We pay for any additional infrastructure, such as the new substation here, as we don’t want any additional cost to be borne by the ratepayer, and if you put Apple in the mix, Prineville has more water flow and increased power capacity than it has ever had.
“This area is definitely open for business and it has been amazing to work here and be part of that journey with the collaborative help of the city and county. As a social media company, we are also proud to be a fully engaged and contributing member of the community.
“There are 1.5 billion users using Facebook currently out of a world population of some 7.5 billion, which means there are six billion people that we would like to help join. We are building a platform to connect the world and continue to innovate and iterate in an effort to make that happen.”
Patchett said the company continually strived to implement aggressive engineering methods and innovations to iterate more robust, efficient servers, with any efficiencies to be gained in the resiliency versus redundancy equation potentially leading to huge savings and impacts in overall sustainability.
As part of that wave, Facebook has installed new, purpose-built high-powered servers, known as the Big Sur project, which are designed to accelerate efforts to train software to do things like translate posts between languages and is regarded as in the top ten of the world’s supercomputers.
It is advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning in an area referred to as deep learning and Big Sur is packed with an enormous number of graphics processing units, or GPUs, in a system designed to train neural networks —
a technology that can do a number of research tasks including learning to identify images by examining enormous numbers of them, rather than identifying images according to rules hand-coded by humans.
Another innovation being employed at the Prineville site is the development of a new cold storage data center area.
More than two billion photos are uploaded on Facebook services daily, but many images are thereafter accessed only occasionally.
To be fiscally responsible, the cold storage areas maintain data in a lower operational cost environment but algorithms detect intelligently whether a user is drilling down to older data and the rarely-used information can be spooled up to higher-traffic server areas as necessary.
Another new development is the Mobile Device Lab at Prineville, where every type of phone — especially relevant as different users use various devices in numerous ways across the globe — can be tested to see if newly developed applications result in any regression in terms of power usage or operational efficiency. If that is the case, the developer can be contacted and a fix requested.
Consistency in the physical testing environment is achieved by creating a self-contained box with one Wi-Fi network connection with 32 phones of a particular type for each access point.
Patchett concluded, “Since the beginning, mankind has had a need to share and technological advancements have enabled people to share their hopes, dreams and knowledge more expediently than ever.
“Via Facebook connections, what users feel about issues can be shared with people they know love and trust, rather than opinions being fed from the traditional conventional mass media.
“Six billion more people in the world are waiting to use Facebook and the winds of change are accelerating.
“Efficiency and advancements at our data centers such as here in Prineville is helping broaden our scope and make wider access ever more feasible.”
