CFMs, cubic feet per minute, for a data center is the amount of
air being delivered to the cold aisles. CFMs are also discussed
as the amount of air produced by fans internal to components of
a HPC system. If the CFMs being produced by the system exceed
the maximum CFMs a data center can deliver to the cold aisles,
hot air may be circulating into the cold aisles, can create hot
spots in a rack or in certain sections of the data center,
increase the likely hood of component failures, and possibly
exceed the temperature limits of components causing power outage
and downtime. One key formula I use when I want to calculate
CFMs for particular components of a HPC system, such as a
compute node, is the following:CFMs = (3412*W/1000) / (1.085 *
∆T)In the above formula, W represents the peak measured power
consumption in watts when stressing the components with a
particular benchmark, such as Linpack discussed in Part 2 of my
blog, and ∆T is the change in temperature between the air
entering the system components and