with the international supercomputing conference (isc17) taking place in frankfurt, germany from june 18-22, many companies in the high-performance computing industry are looking at thermal management challenges and realizing that power and density requirements are becoming too much for convection cooling to handle.

asetek has created liquid cooling solutions for hpc. (wikimedia commons)

hpc wire called this moment the “inflection point” for the industry to understand that liquid cooling solutions, whether at the device, rack or even building level, are going to be a necessity to ensure proper performance.

the article explained, “as isc17 approaches we are seeing the highest frequency offerings of intel’s knight’s landing, nvidia’s p100 and intel’s skylake (xeon) processor. with that comes high wattages at the node-level with even higher wattages coming in the near future. hpc cooling requirements mean that good-enough levels of heat removal are no longer sufficient.”

as hpc wire noted, there are a number of research facilities that are working on liquid cooling solutions and many are running hot water liquid cooling technology from asetek, including the rackcdu d2c system.

“asetek’s direct to chip distributed cooling architecture addresses the full range of heat rejection scenarios,” the article claimed. “the distributed pumping architecture is based on low pressure, redundant pumps and closed loop liquid cooling within each server node. this approach allows for a high level of flexibility.”

other solutions from asetek include the serverlsl, server-level liquid enhanced air cooling solution, which exhausts the hot air to the ambient and requires hvac systems as well.

“rackcdu d2c (direct-to-chip) utilizes redundant pumps/cold plates atop server cpus and gpus, cooling those components and optionally memory and other high heat components,” the article explained. “the heat collected is moved it via a sealed liquid path to heat exchangers in the rackcdu for transfer of heat into facilities water.”