Asetek, a leading supplier of liquid cooling solutions for computers, said Thursday that it would showcase a liquid cooled HPC cluster with extreme compute performance at SC12 supercomputer conference next week. The showcase is groundbreaking in the areas of power efficiency, performance and density thanks to RackCDU liquid-cooling technology.

Asetek to Enable Breakthrough in Datacenter Efficiency

The company will show the HPC cluster built on an industry standard 48U rack, 46Us of which are filled with 23 2U 4-node Intel H2216WPJR servers, each with dual Xeon E5 2690 CPUs providing a total CPU and core count of 184 and 1472 respectively. Under load, that is all converted in to heat. In the showcase cluster all CPU and memory heat, (85% of the total server heat generated) is cooled by Asetek’s warm water liquid cooling RackCDU system. As the servers are cooled by warm water, no power goes in to actively chilling the liquid. This means that 85% of all server-generated heat is cooled by free ambient air.

According to Asetek, using traditional server air-cooling and room air conditioning, it would be impossible to run the fully populated rack that consumes 37kW of power. In fact, it would require another 22kW of power just to keep it cool (industry average PUE 1.8/pPUE1.6).

“Seeing is believing and with this SC12 demonstration on the show floor we will show in real time the value proposition of our system and how efficient liquid cooling really is. What we are showing is unheard of density and performance while being as environmentally friendly as possible” said Andre Eriksen, chief executive of Asetek.

Asetek RackCDU: 250% Rack Level Density Increase, 50% Cooling Energy Savings

RackCDU is a hot water, direct-to-chip, data center liquid cooling system that enables cooling energy savings exceeding 50% and density increases of 250% when compared to modern air-cooled data centers. RackCDU removes heat from CPUs, GPUs, memory modules and other hot spots within servers and takes it all the way out of the data center using liquid.

Free ambient outdoor air cools the water returning to the data center, meaning no power is used to actively chill the water. The water leaving the data center is hot enough to enable waste heat recycling, further increasing energy cost savings, reducing carbon footprint and resulting in cooling energy reuse efficiencies (EREs) below 1.

“In today’s world where power efficiency is of paramount importance it is great to see innovations like Asetek’s RackCDU.  This is a highly innovative cooling solution that very much complements our innovative and power efficient Intel Xeon Processor E5 family, new Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, and Intel Server boards and systems from EPSD. With innovation such as this, essentially all power is being spent on computation rather than on cooling,” stated Noury Al-Khaledy, GM of Intel enterprise platforms and services division.

RackCDU is deployed at a rack/server level providing maximum scalability. The system consists of a zero-U rack level CDU (cooling distribution unit) mounted in a 10” (250mm) rack extension that includes space for 3 additional PDUs, and direct-to-chip cooling loops within each server. The direct-to-chip cooling loops are drop in replacements for the existing air heat sinks, with tubes exiting through an unused PCIe slot. This enables RackCDU deployment as a retrofit during server refresh cycles and in new builds.

“Our RackCDU is brand agnostic, does not require any change in industry standards and will work with any brand of server and rack. We clearly demonstrate this by using off-the shelf hardware throughout the entire cluster. Any data center system integrator, OEM or operator will be able to benefit from our solution and unlike any other liquid cooling solution on the market, our product is based upon our more than 1.3 million liquid cooling units already deployed in the field as well as 13 years of liquid cooling experience,” said Mr. Eriksen.

The full scale showcase will be run live at the show under full load using Caedium’s OpenFoam based CFD software. SC12 will take place in Salt Lake City, Utah on November 12-15, 2012.

Tags: Asetek, HPC, RackCDU