high-performance computing ➤
clearance and building heating in the winter. Where the heat is not being
reused within the building, the fact that the Asetek system also uses warm input water, at 45C, means that it can be cooled to this temperature by dry cooling almost anywhere in the world, with evaporative cooling to the environment if need be, on demand. Dry cooling cuts in half the cost of heat rejection to the environment, he said. Tere is a further energy reduction of
THE HPC
MARKET IS THE LEADER IN
ADOPTING NEW ENERGY EFFICIENCY TECHNOLOGY
about 5 – 10 per cent depending on the configuration, he said, because ‘we can spin the fans in the servers more slowly.’ But Branton stressed that
switching to the Asetek system produces savings on capital as well as operating expenditures. ‘Mississippi State University and the US Sandia National Laboratories chose to use our system partly because of the energy efficiency,’ he said, ‘but
also because they needed to expand the capacity of their cooling system to put in new compute. Te cost of putting in dry cooling was substantially lower than putting in chillers, so they were able to buy more compute. Which is of course what matters most to the scientists – they want to get more compute for their dollar.’ Asetek is a European company;
it was founded, and still has its headquarters, in Denmark. It too started in gaming, and has sold millions of units, and it too sees a bigger market now in server-based systems: ‘We have over 3,000 servers in the field cooled by our technology – all production systems not test systems,’ Branton said. It’s very competitive: Asetek
and CoolIT Systems have recently been involved in patent litigation that was resolved only in June this year, with the US District Court in San Jose, California, deciding that CoolIT Systems should pay $1,873,168 in damages to Asetek. Asetek’s system consists of
a cold plate, incorporating a water pump, sitting on top of the processor through which water flows to a rack level CDU (Cooling Distribution Unit) mounted at the back of the rack in a 10.5 inch extension that houses a liquid-to-liquid
Not only cool but waterproof as well -- LiquidCool Solutions provides not only energy efficiency but ruggedised computing
heat exchanger to transfer heat between the facility’s water and the server water. Because the cold plate is smaller, it is possible to incorporate the pump in a unit that is no bigger than the original air-cooling fins. But direct to chip cooling
removes only the heat generated by the processor itself, so Asetek has refined its range to include a hybrid liquid and air system, ISAC, that removes 100 per cent of the heat generated within a server, according to Branton. In addition to the direct cooling of the processor, ISAC also has In-Server Air Conditioners which cool the remaining, low heat-flux components without exchanging air between servers and the data centre. All the air in the server is sealed inside, and recirculates rather than mixing with the air in the data centre. Te heat is extracted from the server air by a heat exchanger to be taken away by the facility’s system, along with the heat from the directly cooled processors. Again, the system is housed in a rack extension.
Motivair’s ChilledDoor system on a HPC cluster. The smaller box on the far left is a Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU)
30 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
Convective cooling Although the engineering of Asetek’s sealed sever system is very different, a similar principle is being developed by the UK based company Iceotope. Iceotope too relies on a completely sealed server to remove all the heat, but in its case, the server is totally immersed in a liquid – 3M’s Novec fluid, which is inert
and, in fact, oſten used as a fire suppressant. Iceotope provides blades that have been designed to act as convective cells so that natural convective flow moves the fluid, and therefore the heat, from the electronics. Although this is a single-phase operation, because of the convection this stage requires no external pumps, just as Calyos’s dual- phase system eliminates pumps. However, the Iceotope system interposes a secondary loop, using a different coolant, that is pumped to heat exchangers for re-use to heat the building or rejection to the environment. Iceotope, which is based in
the UK, started out with its eyes on the high-performance computing market, introducing its Petagen system at SC14 in New Orleans, but now, Peter Hopton, founder and CVO, said: ‘I can see other markets taking an interest in our technology. In terms of cost effectiveness, our technology has a place in the Web Giant/Cloud space’. He pointed out that, although the likes of Facebook and Google have recently stressed their green credentials by putting data centres in climatically cold areas, the reality was that they needed to site their centres ‘within 50ms of latency from their customers’ – within city centres or close to city centres. ‘One of the reasons that
market is good for us is that they look at the cost of everything holistically. Over the lifetime of installation, a third of the
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