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Cirocco Live Liquid Cooled Rack

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the big-iron-on-the-hip dept.

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.

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  1. Mod -5 Don't Let The Other Geeks Know I'm Clueless by nick_davison · · Score: 4, Informative

    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