Liquid cooling helps drive high performance computing

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc today unveiled a revolutionary liquid cooling technology that would allow computers to operate at unprecedented speeds of multiple petaflops (thousands of trillions of calculations per second) even as it delivered significant energy savings and installation flexibility.

Cray XT5 systems would start shipping with the company's new ECOphlex (PHase-change Liquid EXchange) technology later this year.

The new ECOphlex technology facilitates energy savings by enabling greater system density, reducing the need for expensive air cooling and air conditioners, and limiting the need for chilled water.

The insatiable drive for ever faster computing power has seen servers getting denser and correspondingly hotter. Today, a rack of high-end blades on fans can dissipate 30 kilowatts  but given the fact that air is a poor conductor of heat, the burden on the cooling infrastructure keeps escalating.

Keeping the machinery at a comfortable temperature takes up a third to a half of a facility's power consumption. There is a growing shift towards liquid cooling in supercomputing.

High performance machines, which have been at the cutting edge of computational density, have at times have had to look beyond air for cooling. In fact,  the early Cray systems in the 1970s, as also a number of top-end supercomputers  used water or some other liquid coolant running through the hardware which led the father of supercomputing, Seymour Cray, refer to himself as "an overpaid plumber."