Dunking your servers

eWeek Europe is carrying an article today on IT startup Green Revolution Cooling’s innovative approach to cooling your HPC gear

Cooling unitGreen Revolution Cooling (GRC) launched at the SC09 show in November, at the same time as UK company Iceotope launched a liquid-cooled server system, but GRC says its system is radically simpler, cheaper and easier to maintain.  The company showed a horizontal 42U rack filled with 37 servers and 2 switches which it says only required 40 Watts of cooling power for 5,000 watts of server power.

40 Watts to cool 5000 Watts of gear is really good, but with density such an issue in datacenters I wonder if the technology is really that relevant in supercomputing centers. You get more than 2x the density by standing them up as by laying the rack with its long side down (dimensions vary, but I used a 42U x 24 in x 34 in rack, outside dimensions). Still, according to the article, the technology is being tested at TACC.

GRC’s system suspends the electronics directly in the liquid, but despite this, the company says the system is easy to maintain. A video on the GRC site shows a technician lifting out one of the blades, allowing it to drain over the tank, and removing and replacing a RAM stick – the video itself (below) lasts only a minute.

“We gave literally a hundred maintenance demonstrations at SC 09 and people were very surprised at how easy it was to service,” said Mark Tlapak, co-president of GRC.

Comments

  1. Hi John,

    I think the link to eWeek has gone missing from the article..

    cheers!
    Chris

  2. John West says

    Sorry, fixed.