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One Data Center To Rule Them All
1sockchuck writes "Weta Digital, the New Zealand studio that created the visual effects for the 'Lord of the Rings' movie trilogy, has launched a new "extreme density" data center to provide the computing horsepower to power its digital renderings. Weta is running four clusters that are each equipped with 156 of HP's new 2-in-1 blade servers, and use liquid cooling to manage the heat loads. The Weta render farms currently hold spots 219 through 222 on the current Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers."
Liquid cooled, not water cooled. They cool it in an inert liquid, rather than water.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Would it be a good idea to replace the water with mineral oil? I'm sure a lot of you have seen the computers submerged in mineral oil, so it would probably just cause a mess if there was a leak. The problem with mineral oil (based on my limited knowledge from searching just now) is that it's not as efficient at removing heat as water, and after time the oil breaks down and needs replacing to remain at its most efficient. I'm not sure if the heat levels from a server would be high enough to degrade the oil though. I'm also uncertain if the oil would cause any damage to the pumps (or whatever pushes the liquid around) in the water cooling system.
I can't speak for anyone else, but in our data center we have two sets of chilled water pipes and two sets of return pipes, in case one does break. They are valved all over the place so any one set of pipe can go down and the others continue working.
As well, the chilled water never enters the data center. Our CRAC units sit outside of the data center and are ducted in overhead (because we can reach higher space velocities than with a raised floor). Thus, no chilled water ever gets inside of hte data center rooms.
I also think it's pretty funny that a supercomputer is used to make movies.
It was pretty funny forty years ago, too.
The LHCb experiment has a large processor farm for their online data analysis, all water cooled. Apparently it makes the computer scientists very nervous. OTOH, the main computing centre just uses air cooling, so we've got a real mix of technology.
xterm -n 8
Well they may be using a different liquid than water. Mainframes have been using water cooling for years.
But even if they are using water we are talking about professionals here. They have been water cooling electrical devices that are far more dangerous than CPUs for many years.
http://www.cobermuegge.com/details.asp?id=90
And here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Cooling
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Throughput on a Tolkien ring can reach very high performance levels when the data is encoded in an Elvish Language.
For strange characters support, unicorn encoding is recommended.