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Cirocco Live Liquid Cooled Rack
Mark Grant writes "Cirocco have developed a liquid cooled rack of AMD Duron 1.1Gs in a Beowulf cluster. The rack has been installed in Cambridge University, England and has been under trial since Christmas. The system is being put through its paces running chemical research algorithms.
Critical to Cirocco's liquid cooling system are the hot swappable quick couplings. These allow servers to be disconnected whilst the cooling system is in operation." The graph with live temperature readings is pretty neat.
For those of use who've grown used to making "Woo, imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!" jokes yet have no clue what a Beowulf cluster actually is, the definition, history and so on is available at:
NASA's Beowulf site
In brief overview:
In the summer of 1994 Thomas Sterling and Don Becker, working at CESDIS under the sponsorship of the ESS project, built a cluster computer consisting of 16 DX4 processors connected by channel bonded Ethernet. They called their machine Beowulf. The machine was an instant success and their idea of providing COTS (Commodity off the shelf) base systems to satisfy specific computational requirements quickly spread through NASA and into the academic and research communities. The development effort for this first machine quickly grew into a what we now call the Beowulf Project. Some of the major accomplishment of the Beowulf Project will be chronicled below, but a non-technical measure of success is the observation that researcher[s(sp)] within the High Performance Computer community are now referring to such machines as "Beowulf Class Cluster Computers." That is, Beowulf clusters are now recognized as genre within the HPC community./i
FYI... the artical talks about this.
The Cray T3E is cooled with fluorinert. The heat is then dumped into cooling water with an external heat exchanger unit. The processor element modules (PEMs) - a board with 8 alpha processors 4 on the bottom mounted against an solid aluminium block and 4 on the top mounted upside down to the same block - slide into the processor cabinet and have quick release cooling hose couplings.
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
many good reasons to use liquid cooling. firstly, it's *very* efficient and it allows very high volumetric density. secondly, there are times when air cooling is a Truly Bad Idea, like on boats, ships, and submarines, but also even "ground-based" transportation applications. It's pretty clear that blowing salt air over a circuit board (even with conformal coating) is a Bad Idea(tm), but it's also true in cars, trucks (aka "lorries"), and things like earthmovers. and in large systems, the efficiency part is a Really Big Deal. Heating up a huge flow of air on its way to the ceiling, just so the air chiller can try to move it back down to get sucked in again is just stupid except at very small scale. the Beowulf cluster in question may not *demand* liquid cooling, but you don't have to build one a lot larger for the difference to matter a lot. (This is especially true in Europe where rooms are not airconditioned to the degree they are in the US in the first place.) rather than upgrade an entire AC system, which probably involves lots of work on a 500 year old building, just run the loop to a remote chiller and declare victory. as for "it will leak", note that almost everything electronic in a submarine is liquid-cooled. it is true that the primary loop through the cold plate may not be water, but it gets to a water loop pretty quickly. no-leak connectors have been around a very long time - just not cheap ones. a large demand for better cooling technology is important to drive down the costs and to make it commonplace and not just the province of "Big Iron" (supercomputers or otherwise). -mo