GRC (Green Revolution Cooling), a single-phase liquid immersion cooling company for data centers, today announced that it is providing the cooling infrastructure for the Lonestar6 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
The company’s ICEraQ Series 10 will cool the Dell C6525 servers, which contain AMD EPYC “Milan” CPUs, used within TACC’s Lonestar6 supercomputer, a top 10 supercomputers at a U.S. university and three times more powerful than the Lonestar5. Unveiled in November, Lonestar6 is composed of 560 compute nodes and 16 GPU nodes utilizing Nvidia Ampere A100 GPUs for machine learning workflows and other GPU-enabled applications. It uses Nvidia-Mellanox HDR Infiniband technology and 8 PB of BeeGFS based storage on Dell storage hardware.
Lonestar6 is dedicated to academic researchers throughout Texas and will serve as the main high performance computing resources for the University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastucture (UTRC) initiative. The new deployment is a 280 kW system, which GRC said has a reduction in server power of 10 percent from fan removal, and 2 percent cooling power overhead for the immersion system, yielding a pPUE of 1.02.
GRC said its partnership with TACC began in 2009, when the organizations validated the cost-effectiveness of liquid immersion cooling in both energy and operations. GRC cools the GPU-intensive subsystem of TACC’s Frontera supercomputer — ranked 13th on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Lonestar6 supercomputer (credit: TACC)
The Series 10 system is a modular design that allows units to be positioned end-to-end, saving floorspace. It features an integrated containment area, eliminating the need for external containment decks; and is designed to optimize floor space utilization, allowing for the greatest number of racks without a walkway. CDU capacity has increased to 200 kilowatts with warm water and up to 368 kilowatts with chilled water, as well as the potential for at least a 50 percent larger brazed plate heat exchanger for higher power future applications, according to the company.
“We’re excited to be deploying GRC’s latest liquid immersion cooling technology,” said Tommy Minyard, director of advanced computing systems at TACC. “We have had a long partnership with GRC and we look forward to building off all of our successes by utilizing the Series 10 to power the new Lonestar6 supercomputer, enabling TACC to continue to be at the forefront of scientific research. In addition to providing the cooling capacity necessary, we will continue to reduce our facility’s carbon footprint through the use of liquid immersion cooling.”
“GRC values its longstanding partnership with TACC, and we’re delighted to once again provide the necessary cooling infrastructure to help power the important research being conducted by scientists and researchers across the state of Texas,” said Peter Poulin, CEO, GRC. “The deployment of the ICEraQ Series 10 will provide Lonestar6 with a highly efficient cooling infrastructure, enabling a consistent thermal environment while reducing the amount of cooling energy.”
Earlier this year, GRC secured the Data Centre World Innovation Product of the Year Award for the ICEraQ Series 10.
