[Beowulf] 'liquid cooled' racks

Eric Shook eric-shook at uiowa.edu
Mon Dec 4 07:13:38 PST 2006


Hi Bruce,

Our University is also looking into these racks.  We have also looked at 
other vendors with similar liquid cooling and something called 
"Spraycool" technology (limited in deployment) among others.  I would 
also be interested in the information you collect on or off the list and 
would be willing to share some information.

Thanks,
Eric

-- 
Eric Shook (319) 335-6714
Technical Lead, Systems and Operations - GROW
http://grow.uiowa.edu


Bruce Allen wrote:
> Dear Beowulf list,
> 
> For my next cluster room, I am hoping to use 'liquid cooled' racks make 
> by Knurr (CoolTherm, http://www.thermalmanagement.de/).  The scale is 67 
> racks x 7.5kW heat removal per rack (36 U usable per rack).
> 
> Does anyone on the list have experiences with these or similar racks 
> (you can reply to me privately if you don't want to share your 
> experiences publicly)?  I am told that there are lots of installations 
> in Europe, especially in Germany, but that the only US sites are at Penn 
> State, somewhere in the Chicago area, and U. of Vermont, and that these 
> US installations are fairly small-scale.
> 
> The racks have front and back doors that close, and contains fans in the 
> back which circulate air through a heat exchanger located in the bottom 
> of the rack.  The heat exchanger transfers the heat into chilled water.
> 
> The advantages of this are that it is quiet, and that you don't need 
> vertical height for underfloor ducting or overhead hot air removal. 
> Disadvantages are cost, potential difficulty of working within the rack. 
> and loss of one rack of cooling capacity if you open both the front and 
> back doors.
> 
> (In this case I have access to 'building' funds that can not be used to 
> buy more cpus, so the cost issue is not important.)
> 
> I would be very interested to hear about people's experiences with these 
> racks (or similar ones from another manufacturer) in an HPC environment.
> 
> Cheers,
>     Bruce
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