it was recently announced that coolit systems, inc., based in calgary, was chosen by the university of toronto to develop a custom liquid cooling solution for the single processing part of the canadian hydrogen intensity mapping experiment (chime) located in penticon, british columbia.

the telescope array in bristish columbia. (chime)

chime is a radio telescope consisting of cylindrical reflectors with an array of radio receivers that will be used to map the distribution of neutral hydrogen over the redshift range. this will allow scientists from the university of toronto, macgill university, the university of british columbia and the dominion radio astrophysical observatory to produce a map of cosmic structure over the largest volume ever observed.

it is the largest radio telescope in canada and the first to be built in the country in more than 30 years.

as the telescope was being designed, researchers saw that there would be an enormous cost to using traditional air conditioners to try and cool the large volume of computing power that is necessary to collect information from the telescope.

instead, the organizers decided to look for a new solution and settled on coolit systems, which will provide a liquid cooling solution house inside of a sealed container that acts as a faraday cage to prevent leakage of electromagnetic energy.

the telescope will have a footprint larger than six nhl rinks, according to a story on cantechletter.com, and will collect signals that need to be digitally sampled at “nearly one billion times per second.” in order to accomplish that goal, 256 rack-mounted general technics gt0180 4u servers will be used with intel xeon e5 2620v3 cpus and dual amd firepro s9300x2 gpus.

coolit systems will install a custom rack dclc system with direct contact cooling loops that dissipate 100 percent of the heat generated and simultaneously pull ambient heat into the liquid cooling loops.

watch a drone video over the chime project at http://chime.phas.ubc.ca/drone_20161015_1k.mp4.