insideHPC » Green HPC

Winston Saunders on Exascalar and Cost-effective HPC

Ralph — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:31:14 +0000

Over the Intel Datastack Blog, Winston Saunders writes considering the rapidly expanding efficiency and performance capability of supercomputing systems, it may be time to upgrade just for the electricity savings alone.

You can see system-level annualized energy costs in the Figure. From this point it is pretty straight forward to calculate a payback time for replacing inefficient servers. It’s interesting they work out to be vertical lines. It’s interesting that they times for return on investment show up as vertical lines. It’s astounding that they are so short. In several cases, less than a year!

Read the Full Story.

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Green Graph 500 Launches to Boost Energy Efficient Big Data Computing

Staff — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:37:39 +0000

In this special guest feature, Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich writes that the new Green Graph500 aims to boost energy-efficient Big Data Computing.

“Big Data” can be analyzed in various ways. The most successful and prevalent programming model, MapReduce, convinces by its flexibility toadapt to hardware performance variations and faults. However, even though MapReduce covers a huge majority of use-cases, it has its limits for graph computations. Complex graph algorithms become more important as our analysis capabilities grow. For example, problems such as finding hubs in social network graphs are routinely answered today. The underlying algorithm, betweenness centrality, utilizes a graph traversal similar to breadth first search or shortest path search. Systems such as Google’s Pregal, Apache’s Giraph, the (Parallel) Boost Graph Library, and Stanford’s GPS are just some examples for emerging frameworks to handle large-scale graph computations. In order to efficiently compare architectures and possibly programming frameworks, the Graph 500 benchmark strives to establish a database for performance of a standardized breadth first search on various platforms.

As energy is becoming a bigger concern than hardware purchasing costs in large-scale data centers and supercomputing centers, it becomes mandatory to not only consider the performance of such computations but also their exact energy consumption. In fact, if the current cost trends continue, then energy consumption will soon be more important than absolute performance. Such discussions are highly relevant for operators of large data centers such as Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, as well as large supercomputing centers operated by the DOE (e.g., LLNL, Sandia,LANL, ORNL) and the NSF (e.g., NCSA, SDSC, PSC). We are thus looking forward to interesting future developments targeting exascale as well as Big Data architectures and programming frameworks.

We introduce the Green Graph 500 list which fulfills a variety of purposes. First and foremost it is to establish the practice to compete not only for the highest performance but also for the highest energy efficiency, directly benefiting society. It is also set out to collect historical data about developments that may allow us to predict future trends very similar to what the top 500 list has achieved in the past(who doesn’t like to put up a top 500 slide to project out FLOP rate for the next 10 years?). The list will also allow us to compare the energy efficiency of a specific computer for certain tasks, e.g.,dense linear algebra (a problem mainly limited by memory size and CPU peak floating point performance) versus graph search (a problem mainly limited by memory access rates and global system bandwidth). Those two metrics together may serve as a measure to generate more efficient balanced systems as well as special-purpose systems for one of those tasks.

Finally, the new Green Graph 500 list is not meant to compete with any of the existing lists. It is indeed complementary, filling an important gap in the field. In fact, the rules are designed to be similar to the established Green 500 rules (similar, not identical, for example with regards to the network) so that comparisons can easily be made in the future. It also directly integrates with the Graph 500 list and submission system to guarantee one-to-one comparisons (a submission record may be in the Green Graph 500 as well as the Graph 500 even though the lists are ranked by different indices).

The Green Graph 500 list is soliciting submissions from everyone through the Graph 500 submission system. To submit to the list, simply start a normal Graph 500submission and select “Submit to Green Graph 500″ or “Submit to both lists”. The only additional data you need for a Green Graph 500submission is the actual power draw of your system during the benchmark.

Another small difference between Graph 500 and it’s Green peer is the measurement methodology. Since most power meters are not accurate enough to measure the rather short actual BFS run (not including the post-check etc.), we offer a slightly modified version of the reference benchmark which allows to run the BFS in a tight loop long enough for a low-time resolution energy meter to measure the exact energy consumption. This benchmark will also report a Graph 500 number valid for submission. For runs with a custom implementation, this would need to be ensured manually (4-5 lines of C Code suffice for this). The submission opens together with the official Graph 500 submission.

As a sneak peek, we prepared a sample list from March 2013′s energy submissions (which may not have followed all the official rules, thus, the list is not official).

The Green Graph 500 list is maintained by Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich in collaboration with the Graph 500 executive committee. For questions or comments please contact info@green.graph500.org.

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Mont Blanc Targets Scientific Applications for Energy Efficient HPC

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:06:52 +0000

While many are looking at ARM-based processing as the future of energy-efficient HPC, it won’t get far without applications. Now, the Mont Blanc project has published a list of key scientific apps to be ported to the platform.

The Mont Blanc project aims to assess the potential of low-power embedded components based clusters to address future Exascale HPC needs. Among other objectives, we also aim to assess on the different generation of platforms made available by the project the behaviour of up to eleven real exascale-class scientific applications. These eleven real scientific applications, used by academia and industry, running daily in production into existing European (PRACE Tier-0 systems) or national HPC facilities have been selected by the different partners in order to cover a wide range of scientific domains (geophysics, fusion, materials, particle physics, life sciences, combustion, weather forecast) as well as hardware and software needs.

Read the Full Story.

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IBM’s SuperMUC at LRZ to Reach 6.4 Petaflops

Staff — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:27:06 +0000

HPC System SuperMUC, installed at GCS centre Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich, has commenced the second part of its installation with a performance upgrade.

Nine months after its inauguration, an agreement was sealed for a planned system expansion to be completed by end of 2014 or early 2015. The upgrade of the LRZ supercomputer, SuperMUC, which currently delivers a peak performance of 3.185 petaflops and holds position 6 on the Top500 list, will boost the system’s performance by a factor of about 2.1, making it capable of 6.4 petaflops.

The contract for SuperMUC Phase II was signed by representatives of all parties involved: Arndt Bode of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), Karl-Heinz Hoffmann (chair of Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften), Martina Koederitz (general manager of IBM Germany), and Andreas Pflieger (IBM) in the presence of Wolfgang Heubisch and Georg Antretter representing the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Research and the Arts.

The agreement states that 74,302 Intel-Xeon processor cores will be added to the existing 155,656 processor cores of SuperMUC. Its main memory will be expanded from 340 to 538 terabytes and 9 petabytes of intermediate storage will complement the system’s existing capacity of 10 petabytes.

The LRZ HPC system has been designed for exceptionally versatile deployment. The more than 150 different applications running on SuperMUC on average per year range from solving problems in physics and fluid dynamics to a wealth of other scientific fields, such as aerospace and automotive engineering, medicine and bioinformatics, astrophysics and geophysics amongst others.

Professor Bode is confident that SuperMUC Phase II will be running as stably and reliably as the current system has done from day one – and that it will scale to the large number of cores.

Only shortly after starting operation, SuperMUC was working to full capacity. Already, there are applications that practically use the entire system, and they do this in a very efficient way. Especially in the realm of biology and life sciences, we expect a significantly higher demand of system performance in the foreseeable future. SuperMUC Phase II will be in an excellent position to meet these requirements,’ said Bode.

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

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Adaptiva Delivers Parallella Low-cost Parallel Chip Board for Linux Supercomputing

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:24:31 +0000

Say hi to Parallella, the $99 Linux-powered supercomputer. (Image: The Linux Foundation)

Over at ZDnet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that chip-company Adapteva has built their first Parallella parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputing and will be sending them to their 6,300 Kickstarter supporters and other customers by this summer.

What Adapteva has done is create a credit-card sized parallel-processing board. This comes with a dual-core ARM A9 processor and a 64-core Epiphany Multicore Accelerator chip, along with 1GB of RAM, a microSD card, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, and an HDMI connection. If all goes well, by itself, this board should deliver about 90 GFLOPS of performance, or — in terms PC users understand — about the same horse-power as a 45GHz CPU. This board will use Ubuntu Linux 12.04 for its operating system. To put all this to work, the platform reference design and drivers are now available.

Read the Full Story.

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Video: Green Policies and Auto Power Management

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:32:14 +0000

In this video from Moabcon 2013, Gary Brown from Adaptive Computing presents: Green Policies and Auto Power Management.

This talk will help you understand Moab’s Power Management capabilities and how one might leverage the powerful capabilities of Moab’s Auto Power Management in one’s HPC environment to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Customer use cases will be presented to illustrate the ways leading companies are implementing these features to achieve real and significant results. Additionally, we will discuss best practices and general trends that we see in market today and in these best practices and trends influence Adaptive Computing’s product roadmap. Time will be allotted to accommodate a robust discussion around best practices and future product considerations.”

For more presentation videos, check out the Moabcon 2013 Video Gallery.

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Biggest Names in Cloud are Turning to Liquid Cooling

Staff — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:44:17 +0000

Christopher Mims at Quartz reports that many of the big players in the Cloud space are migrating from air-controlled cooling to liquid cooling systems lead by companies like Green Revolution and Asetek.

In an un-air-conditioned shed in a location Price will not disclose, alongside bags of salt used to run a water softening system, sit waist-high tanks full of mineral oil. In their depths are tiny lights blinking like bioluminescent creatures from the abyss, and something even more unexpected: row after row of PC motherboards, craggy with RAM and CPUs and hard drives and cables. Each one is more or less straight off the rack—the same hardware that, in any other data center, would be cooled by an air-moving infrastructure that begins with gigantic air-conditioning systems and ends in palm-sized fans attached directly to the motherboards themselves.

Read the Full Story.

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Jack Dongarra Visits Europe’s Largest Intel Xeon Phi Supercomputers from RSC Group

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:21:00 +0000

Tornado Supercomputer. (Pictured from left to right): Oleg Aladyshev (JSCC RAS), Jack Dongarra, Pavel Telegin (JSCC RAS) Alexey Ovsyannikov (JSCC RAS) Boris Shabanov (Deputy Director, JSCC RAS)

In a recent trip to Russia, renowned HPC expert Jack Dongarra visited two of Europe’s top Intel Xeon Phi supercomputer sites deployed by RSC Group, the Russian leading innovative HPC solutions builder. As the first Xeon Phi supercomputers outside of the USA being already ranked by Top500 and Green500, the systems are deployed at South Ural State University (SUSU) and Joint Supercomputer Center of Russian Academy of Science (JSCC RAS).

Both SUSU and JSCC RAS are state of the art high performance computing centers with competent staff running the highly ranked Top500 and Green500 powerful and energy efficient supercomputers,” said Jack Dongarra. “The facilities both use RSC Tornado based systems with innovative liquid cooling and newest Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors which provide impressive high performance capabilities and energy efficient solutions to solve very demanding science research and engineering problems.”

Dongarra was very impressed by high level of energy efficiency and world record computing (up to 181 TFLOPS per rack) and power (up to 100 kW per rack) density while having a very small footprint because of RSC Tornado liquid cooling technology implemented in the those both Russian projects.

This is a very simple and economical way to do it – in terms of the used space and power – which provides a good environment for the computer systems as well as for the people who take care of it. I see here a rather small room being equipped by a very powerful supercomputing system. I think this is a good sign of the well done engineering and planning have gone into construction of this computing facility.”

Read the Full Story.

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NICS, Adaptive Computing, and Intel: Leadership in HPC

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:00:43 +0000

In this video from Moabcon 2013, Troy Baer presents: NICS, Adaptive Computing, and Intel: Leadership in HPC.

An Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer named Beacon, deployed by the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) of the University of Tennessee, tops the current Green500 list, which ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers based on their power efficiency. To earn its number-one ranking, the supercomputer employed Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors to produce 112.2 trillion calculations per second using only 44.89 kW of power, resulting in world-record efficiency of 2.499 billion floating point operations per second per watt.”

Read the Full Story or View the Slides on Slideshare. For more presentations, check out the Moabcon 2013 Video Gallery.

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Wyoming Supercomputer Center Wins Green Enterprise Award

Ralph — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:30:29 +0000

Over at the Star Tribune, Jeremy Fugleberg writes that the NCAR supercomputer facility in Wyoming recently won top honors for its environmentally friendly design. Located in Cheyenne, the facility won first place in the facility design implementation category in the 2013 Green Enterprise IT Awards from the Uptime Institute.

Nearly 10 years of planning and hard work went into designing this facility to be as sustainable as possible, and it is gratifying to have the facility in production use and be able to share what we’ve done,” said Aaron Andersen, deputy director of operations and services at NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, in a news release. “We hope this facility advances the entire industry.”

Operated by NCAR on behalf of the National Science Foundation and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the new datacenter houses the Yellowstone supercomputer and is partially powered by wind turbines.

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Video: Panel Discussion on Exascale Computing and HPC Energy Efficiency

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:30:55 +0000

In this video, Intel’s Winston Saunders moderates a panel discussion on the power challenges of Exascale computing.

Panelists:

Wu Feng – Virginia Tech
Terri Quinn – LLNL
Alan Lee – AMD
George Chiu, IBM
Deva Bodas – Intel

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Hybrid CPU-GPU Chips Plus RDMA and PCI-Express Make for Screamin’ Iron

Staff — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:45:48 +0000

Over at The Register, Timothy Prickett Morgan writes that a GE presentation at the recent GPU Technology Conference discussed the benefits of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) for InfiniBand and its companion GPUDirect method of linking GPU memories to each other across InfiniBand networks.

On plain old CPUs, RDMA allows CPUs running in one node to reach out through an InfiniBand network and directly read data from another node’s main memory, or push data to that node’s memory without having to go through the operating system kernel and the CPU memory controller. If you prefer 10 Gigabit Ethernet links instead, there is an RDMA over Converged Ethernet, or RoCE, wrapper that lets RDMA run on top of Ethernet – as the name suggests. With GPUDirect, which is something that InfiniBand server adapter and switch maker Mellanox Technologies has been crafting with Nvidia for many years, the idea is much the same. Rather than having a GPU go back to the CPU and out over the network to get data that has been chewed on by another GPU, just let the GPUs talk directly to each other over InfiniBand (or Ethernet with RoCE) and get the CPU out of the loop.

GE's IPN251 hybrid computing card marries a Core i7, a Xilinx FPGA, and an Nvidia Kepler GPU with a PCI switch

Read the Full Story.

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GTC 2013: ARM + GPU = GPU’riffic, says Barcelona SCC

Staff — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:21:24 +0000

In this special guest feature, Dan Olds from Gabriel Consulting writes that the Barcelona Supercomputer Center is making a big bet on ARM processing for HPC.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a steadily growing buzz surrounding the use of ARM chips in PCs, servers, and supercomputers. Here at GTC 2013, that buzz is even more pronounced due to NVIDIA’s upcoming Project Denver, and advances in their GPU technology that result in even less dependency on having a fast and powerful (read: Xeon) processor feeding the GPU number-crunching beasts. Our pal Rik Myslewski penned a great article on GTC 2013 ARM chatter here.

While most everyone has been debating and speculating about what it would be like to combine ARM processors and GPU accelerators, one organization has put together some hardware in order to separate the theoretical from the real. The Barcelona Supercomputer Center (from the Barcelona in Spain, not the other one) is building clusters to explore the potential advantages that might arise from combining low power ARM processors with fast number-crunching GPUs.

Their first attempt, the Tibadabo, was a proof of concept to determine whether it’s possible to build an all-ARM-based cluster. Could they really put together a cluster based on cell phone processors? And, if they could build it, could they find or adapt enough software for it to do useful work?

They were able to construct a two-rack cluster containing 32 blades, 256 nodes, and a total of 512 Tegra 2 ARM cores. They were able to port 11 scientific apps over to ARM with little difficulty, although they did need to fiddle around with the memory hierarchy to optimize some of the apps.

The performance wasn’t all that great. The total system turned out 512 GFLOPs while consuming 3.4 KW, yielding .015 GGLOPs/watt. For context, the best systems on the most recent Green500 list come in around 2.4 or 2.5 GFLOPs/watt, while the systems at the end of the list are rated at .033 GFLOPs/watt.

So they went back to the drawing board and, using NVIDIA’s CARMA development box, clustered 16 of them together as a learning experience they called Pedraforca v1. This system did much better than the ARM-only Tibadabo on energy efficiency, yielding .78 GFLOPs/watts on DGEMM and 5.04 in SGEMM (matrix multiply double and single precision), so they were making progress.

Limitations in the platform (PCIe max of 400 MB/s plus inability to overlap computation and data transfers) meant it couldn’t be scaled up very well. However, it did lead them to a new breakthrough in their thinking for their next system, which they’ve dubbed Pedraforca V2.

They’ve decided the key to building a highly efficient system isn’t to build an accelerated cluster but to build a cluster of accelerators. While there isn’t much difference in the words, there’s a world of difference between the meanings. With Pedraforca v2, they will be de-coupling the CPUs from the GPUs, meaning that the ratio of CPU-GPU can be changed to fit the workloads. They will also be using direct GPU-GPU data transfers via Mellanox’s ConnectX-3 Infiniband interconnects.

This will take a huge amount of latency out of the system and, accordingly, reduce the amount of work the CPU needs to do to orchestrate GPU communications. The prototype system will have 64 nodes which will utilize a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU that will slide into a 4x PCIe slot on a Mini-ITX carrier. In this configuration, the CPU will only be managing boot and MPI communications, plus minimal traffic cop duty for the GPUs. The point is that you don’t need a hugely fast and powerful processor to fulfill these requirements.

However, Pedraforca v2 will have some processing power in the form of Kepler-based NVIDIA K20 GPUs that can deliver 1,170 GFLOP/s through a PCIe Gen3 slot. The GPUs will be able to communicate with each other at 40 Gb/s via the aforementioned Mellanox-fueled Infiniband interconnect.

Both presenters pointed out that this isn’t a general purpose HPC system – it is intended as a host for apps that are GPU-optimized. While they didn’t discuss any FLOPs/watt estimates or performance predictions, it’s safe to say that this system should be an eye opener when it comes to energy efficiency and even cost per FLOP. It’s definitely a project worth watching.

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Video: SuperMUC – One year of Operation

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:33:29 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, Klaus Gottschalk from IBM presents: LRZ SuperMUC – One year of Operation.

The SuperMUC has 147,456 cores and a peak performance of about 3 petaflop/s. The main memory will be 288 terabytes together with 12 petabytes hard disk space based on the GPFS file system. The system will use 18,432 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge-EP processors running in IBM System x iDataPlex servers. It will also use a new form of cooling that IBM developed, called Aquasar, that uses hot water to cool the processors, a design that cuts cooling electricity usage by 40 percent.

Download the Slides (PDF).

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Video: CPU Alternatives for Future High-performance Systems

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:47:43 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, Nikola Puzovic from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center presents: CPU Alternatives for Future High-performance Systems.

Energy efficiency is already a primary concern for the design of any computer system and it is unanimously recognized that future Exascale systems will be strongly constrained by their power consumption. This is why the Mont-Blanc project, which was launched on 1st October 2011, has set itself the following objective: to design a new type of computer architecture capable of setting future global High Performance Computing (HPC) standards that will deliver Exascale performance while using 15 to 30 time less energy. This project is coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and has a budget of over 14 millions, including over 8 million Euros funded by the European Commission.

Download the slides (PDF).

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Video: Who can Beat x86? How to Reduce your Power Footprint and More

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 08:36:43 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, Piero Altoè from E4 Computer Engineering presents: Who can Beat x86? How to reduce your power footprint and more. The company’s new ARKA blades offer extreme power efficiency with ARM-based processors. Download the slides (PDF)

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Video: HP’s Data-centric Datacenters for Exascale and Big Data

RichB — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:48:57 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, Patrick Demichel from HP presents: DCDC for Exascale and Big Data.

Information will be the most valuable resource in the 21st century. Operating on large volumes of diverse data sources to get the right actionable insights at the right time presents new challenges and opportunities for system design. Addressing these opportunities requires a rethinking of future server and data center design—with a datacentric focus across both hardware and software. Here, we’ve presented a brief introduction to some recent research activities in this exciting emerging area, with a specific focus on system architecture and systems software.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out HP’s paper on Data-centric Datacenters (PDF).

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New NREL Datacenter Tops in Petascale Energy Efficiency

Ralph — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:03:14 +0000

One of the missions of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is to advance renewable energy research. So when it came time to build their new HPC datacenter, they decided to “walk the talk” and push the limits of energy-efficient supercomputing.

Well, so far, so good. With the first petascale system to use warm-water liquid cooling and reach an annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.06 or better, the new HPC data center ranks with the most efficient supercomputers in the world.

We took an integrated approach to the HPC system, the data center, and the building as part of the ESIF project,” said Steve Hammond, NREL’s Computational Science Center Director. “First, we wanted an energy-efficient HPC system appropriate for our workload. This is being supplied by HP and Intel. A new component-level liquid cooling system, developed by HP, will be used to keep computer components within safe operating range, reducing the number of fans in the backs of the racks.”

The first phase of the HPC installation began in November 2012, and the system will reach full capacity in the summer of 2013. Read the Full Story.

In related news, NREL is currently seeking a Senior High Performance Computing Engineer.

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6 Petaflop JUQUEEN Supercomputer Goes GA as Fastest in Europe

Ralph — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:19:51 +0000

The JUQUEEN supercomputer at Jülich in Germany is now the powerful supercomputer in Europe. With 458,752 compute cores in 28 racks, the 6 Petaflop system is now fully operational.

JUQUEEN is targeted to tackle comprehensive and complex scientific questions, called Grand Challenges”, explains Prof. Thomas Lippert, Director of JSC. “Projects from various scientific areas can profit from the system’s performance, e.g. in the areas of neuroscience, computational biology, energy, or climate research. Moreover, it enables complicated calculations in quantum physics, which were not possible before.“

The JUQUEEN supercomputer is also extremely efficient with a performance/power ratio of approximately 2 Gigaflop/s per Watt, ranking it #5 on Green500. Read the Full Story.

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Leeds Testing Iceotope Liquid Server Cooling Technology

Staff — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:47:22 +0000

A revolutionary liquid-cooled computer server that could slash the carbon footprint of the internet is being tested at the University of Leeds.

While most computers use air to cool their electronics, all of the components in the new server are completely immersed in liquid. The power-hungry fans of traditional computing are replaced by a silent next-generation liquid-cooling process that relies on the natural convection of heat.

But the significance of the new Iceotope server lies less in the novelty of its design than in the bite it could take out of the huge electricity demands of the internet servers that form the fabric of our online lives. Its designers calculate that the server cuts energy consumption for cooling by between 80 percent and 97 percent.

A 2011 report by Datacenter Dynamics estimated that the world’s data centres currently use 31 gigawatts of power, the equivalent of about half of the UK’s total peak electricity demand. A 2008 report by McKinsey and Company projected that data centre carbon emissions will quadruple by 2020 and a year-long investigation by the New York Times, published in September, criticised the industry for its energy waste.

UK company Iceotope designed and built its new server working with team of researchers led by Dr Jon Summers from the University of Leeds’ School of Mechanical Engineering. The first production system has now been installed at the University after two years of testing prototypes.

Dr Summers, whose team used computational fluid dynamics to model how the coolant flows through the new server’s components, said: “The liquid we are using is extraordinary stuff. You could throw your mobile phone in a tub of it and the phone would work perfectly. But the important thing for the future of computing and the internet is that it is more than 1,000 times more effective at carrying heat than air.”

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

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