high-performance computing ➤
cost is going to be the IT; and third the facility; and a third of the cost is going to be the electricity, depending on where you are. We have a slight upliſt in the IT cost, but the other two are slashed in half,’ he said. In HPC in contrast, the costs are siloed, he continued: ‘Tere will be different budget holders for IT, facility, and electricity, and that can be a barrier to the adoption of more energy efficient technologies’. Asetek’s Steve Branton had a
slightly different analysis of the Web Server market: ‘What we see is the HPC market being the leader in adopting new energy efficiency technology, both because as a whole that market tends to embrace new technology more readily, and because the problem of the power draws/demands are more acute in an HPC centre. HPC tends to have very high utilisation, whereas in a Facebook or a web service organisation what you are worried about is handling the peaks. So a lot of time you have idle capacity, which means the CPUS aren’t working that hard. We’re still able to cool the CPUs in those cases, but the percentage drops when the servers are running idle’. He sees the Asetek system as more useful for people doing HPC or highly virtualised systems: ‘Tose are the two markets we are focused on’.
Rugged cool computers Asetek’s ISAC system which combines on-chip cooling with In-Server Air Conditioners aims to remove close to 100 per cent of the heat from the server. Iceotope’s total fluid immersion system offers a highly engineered route to the same end. Interestingly, another company that was originally interested in the gaming market also offers an immersion solution to remove heat. LiquidCool Solutions was
originally called ‘Hardcore Computing’ but had to change
The cooling circuits inside a node at the Centre for Biological Sequence Analysis at Denmark’s Technical University
its name in part, joked CEO Herb Zien, to get its emails and website past firewalls. But it also changed its business model, so that it now licences its dielectric fluid cooling technology rather than trying to become a hardware provider in its own right. In addition to HPC, it sees markets in ruggedised computers for harsh environments – oil and gas, for example, or military applications where the silent running consequent on the absence of fans is a significant advantage. ‘I don’t know why it has
WE SEE SCALE
AS A REAL CHALLENGE – THE HEAT IS INCREDIBLE
taken the world so long to come around to liquid being the right way to do this, irrespective of the power density,’ Zien said. ‘Air never made sense. Te problem has been how to do it practically and cost efficiently – and that we have solved’. For Zien, the value
proposition was in getting rid of fans. ‘Fans are the horses of the digital age,’ he said. Tey are
32 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
very inefficient; they take a lot of space; and by circulating air over the electronics they can create oxidation problems and bring pollutants to the electronics, in his view. LiquidCool Solutions uses a
standard commercial fluid which is therefore not expensive and is in fact very similar to the fluid used to cool transformers in the power transmission industry. Te directed flow technology brings the ‘cool fluid’ in at the bottom of the server blade – it can be as hot as 45C – and directs it to a heat sink on top of the processors and then out of the heat sink so that it picks up the rest of the heat generated by the server. Te result is a dramatic reduction in thermal fluctuations within the server. Te temperature difference
between inlet and outlet is around 8C to 10C. ‘It’s warm enough to heat hot water, so it’s easy to recover all of the energy and use it,’ Zien said. Flow rates are a litre per minute, so relatively slow. Tere are no moving parts inside the server blade; the fluid is pushed round from a central pumping station. Because there is no vibration from fans, there is no fretting corrosion. Total power to cool is reduced by 98 per cent
compared to air conditioning, he said. According to Zien, immersive
liquid cooling makes sense even for installations with relatively low power consumption. Because the system is completely sealed and noiseless, it opens up wider markets including baggage scanners at airports; computers in sterile areas in hospitals. Together with the integrator Dedicated Computing, they have produced the Explorer 8 for oil and gas exploration, a ruggedised portable supercomputer equivalent to 42U rack in a typical data centre. ‘One of our biggest entry
points is modular data centres, because there the infrastructure doesn’t exist yet so we can save a lot.’ He cited one version that can be put inside a C120 transport plane and go anywhere in the world, ‘providing 200kW of power/computing capacity – pretty powerful for an emergency computing situation’.
Air has not lost its puff LiquidCool does not immerse hard drives. Although it is possible and the company has a patent on how to do it, in general, they sit in a dry area that is not perfused with coolant.
@scwmagazine l
www.scientific-computing.com
CoolIT Systems
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