Thursday, 08 November 2012 02:30

Asetek Inc., the world’s leading supplier of liquid cooling solutions for computers announced today that it will showcase a state of the art power efficient HPC cluster at SC12 in Salt Lake City, Utah - November 12-15. Formal presentations and live demonstrations will be available at Asetek’s booth #4045. The showcase is groundbreaking in the areas of power efficiency, performance and density. The cluster is built on an industry standard 48U rack, 46Us of which are filled with 23 2U 4-node Intel® H2216WPJR servers, each with dual Xeon® E5 2690 CPUs providing a total CPU and core count of 184 and 1472 respectively.

Under load, the fully populated rack consumes 37kW of power that is all converted in to heat. Using traditional server air cooling and room air conditioning, it would be impossible to run at these densities. In reality, it would require another 22kW of power just to keep it cool (Industry Average PUE 1.8/pPUE1.6). In the showcase cluster all CPU and memory heat, (85% of the total server heat generated) is cooled by Asetek’s warm water liquid cooling RackCDU™ system. As the servers are cooled by warm water, no power goes in to actively chilling the liquid. This means that 85% of all server generated heat is cooled by free ambient air.

The net result of using RackCDU™ in a data center is at least 50% savings on the cooling power bill, often times with immediate payback. Because the hot water generated from the RackCDU™ can be reused for facilities heating or cooling, data center operators now can achieve EREs of <1.

“Seeing is believing and with this SC12 demonstration on the show floor we will show in real time the value proposition of our system and how efficient liquid cooling really is. What we are showing is unheard of density and performance while being as environmentally friendly as possible” said Asetek’s CEO Andre Eriksen.

“Our RackCDU is brand agnostic, does not require any change in industry standards and will work with any brand of server and rack. We clearly demonstrate this by using off-the shelf hardware throughout the entire cluster. Any data center system integrator, OEM or operator will be able to benefit from our solution and unlike any other liquid cooling solution on the market, our product is based upon our more than 1.3 million liquid cooling units already deployed in the field as well as 13 years of liquid cooling experience.”

“In today’s world where power efficiency is of paramount importance it is great to see innovations like Asetek’s RackCDU™.  This is a highly innovative cooling solution that very much complements our innovative and power efficient Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 family, new Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors, and Intel® Server boards and systems from EPSD”, stated Noury Al-Khaledy, GM of Intel Enterprise Platforms and Services Division.  “With innovation such as this, essentially all power is being spent on computation rather than on cooling”

Data center cooling alone accounts for roughly 1% of all global electricity consumption, or 120 Billion kWh/year.   RackCDU has the potential to cut global data center cooling energy consumption by more than 50 Billion kWh/year, equivalent to shutting down more than 6 nuclear power plants.

The full scale showcase will be run live at the show under full load using Caedium’s OpenFoam based CFD software.