[Beowulf] /. Cooler room or cooler servers?

[Guy Coates]

> Is >>ANYBODY<< on this list doing wet?  I'd like to hear about it if so,
> as it is an interesting idea and it LOOKS like there are companies that
> sell wet, so there must be clients, right?

Possibly. We are currently in the process of moving into a new datacentre,
with an  air-con cooling capacity will be  2kW/M^2.

We are large blade users, and so we have local power densities which are
much larger than that. (~20kW for a 42UCab of 70 Dual Xeon machines going
at full tilt.) and the expectation is that as we fill up machine room
space, and as CPUs/memory keep on getting hotter, then we will need to
move from air to some sort of water cooling.

To that end the data centre does have the infrastructure to support
chilled water, but will be dry on day-1. Allegedly the water connectors
are "hotplug" so you connect and disconnect new components without
de-pressurising or isolating the entire system.

I imagine the first water cooling deployments will be something like IBM
or SGIs water cooled rack doors. It seems like a reasonably simple way to
add more cooling capacity to standard systems.

However, not having seen any of this stuff in action yet, I retain a
healthy scepticism. Water and computers just makes me nervous..


Cheers,

Guy

-- 
Dr. Guy Coates,  Informatics System Group
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1223 834244 ex 7199