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Inside Facebook's Prineville data center in Central Oregon
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The entrance to Facebook's PRN1 data center in Prineville, OR, appropriately located at 735 Connect Way.
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Servers housed in PRN2, the second of Facebook's data centers. At 450,000 square feet, it's 29 percent larger than the PRN1.
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Facebook is secretive regarding how many servers it uses at Prineville, as well as how much traffic it handles and how much data it stores.
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Facebook designed nearly every inch of its data center itself, including the servers, the server racks, and the wiring.
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Facebook's servers generate an enormous amount of heat, most of which is sucked up through exhaust systems in the ceiling, where it's either reused in the cooling process or sent out of the building.
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Kevin Lee, a technical program manager at Facebook, shows reporters Big Sur, a Nvidia-powered AI training system, at PRN2.
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Big Sur, like every other custom server design Facebook develops, is an open source project and publicly available online.
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Ian Buck, Nvidia’s VP of accelerated computing, stands next to a picture-painting AI system being trained by Big Sur at PRN2.
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This AI was fed more than 12,000 French impressionist paintings and learned to create its own art after just 30 minutes of Big Sur training.
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Facebook's data center allows air to be pulled in through open slits in the building, where it mixes it with hot server exhaust and runs it through water to achieve the ideal temperature.
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Facebook's air filters help in the cooling process, keeping the air free of any contaminants and managing temperature and humidity levels.
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Once air makes it way into the building and through the filters, it is measured for unsafe levels of static electricity before the cooling process.
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Facebook can't make use of all the heat generated by its servers in the cooling process, so any excess air must be pushed out of the building in the relief fan room.
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Facebook chose Oregon for the location of its first data center in part because the state has moderate temperatures and dry air, which is ideal for cooling.
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Facebook runs a mobile device lab at Prineville where it runs new versions of the company's apps to test how they affect performance on older phones.
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The mobile device lab checks phones as old as the iPhone 4 and Nexus 5 to ensure its apps don't adversely affect battery life. Facebook has nearly 2,000 phones, spread out across 60 server racks with 32 units each.
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Facebook uses solar panels to help generate electricity for office operations, part of the reason why the Prineville data center is considered more efficient than the industry standard.
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Facebook designs all of its own servers and racks, and the company makes those designs open source so members of the Open Compute Project can use them.
