Direct-to-chip liquid cooling for reducing power consumption in a subarctic supercomputer centre

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openAccess

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2016

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Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

8
242-249

Series

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING AND NETWORKING, Volume 9, issue 3

Abstract

Reduction of data centre power consumption is a timely challenge. Waste heat reuse is another focus area when developing energy efficient and sustainable data centres. And these two issues are interconnected through liquid cooling of server racks and/or direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Both of these solutions make it possible to transfer a significant proportion of the waste heat energy back to profitable use. Nevertheless, the heat reusing opportunity is not the only benefit direct-to-chip liquid cooling may offer. Another benefit is the notable reduction of power consumption related to cooling fans associated with server blades and rack-level cooling systems. To evaluate this benefit, we performed power consumption and performance measurements in a subarctic supercomputer centre hosting a cluster of 632 blade nodes. Our study concentrated on a 47-node subset that we analysed when the servers were executing the LINPACK benchmark. Our conclusion is that direct-to-chip liquid cooling can reduce the total power consumption, in this case, up to 14.4% depending on the inlet air temperature.

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Keywords

Data centre, Direct-to-chip liquid cooling, Power consumption, Subarctic climate, Supercomputer, Waste heat reuse

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Citation

Ovaska, S J, Dragseth, R E & Hanssen, S A 2016, ' Direct-to-chip liquid cooling for reducing power consumption in a subarctic supercomputer centre ', International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 242-249 . https://doi.org/10.1504/IJHPCN.2016.076269