HPCwire: Cray Unveils New Cooling Technology For the Petascale Era

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August 28, 2008

Cray Unveils New Cooling Technology For the Petascale Era

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Cray, known for its power and packaging prowess since 1976, when Seymour Cray bent the Cray-1 into a "C" shape, is unveiling a petascale-era cooling technology it says is more than 10 times as efficient as same-size water coils. Cray CTO Steve Scott discusses this innovation and the company that was green before green was cool.

HPCwire: What is Cray's new cooling technology?

Scott: We call it ECOphlex technology. The "phlex" part refers to multiple things. First, the cabinet infrastructure can use either Cray’s high-efficiency vertical air cooling or our new phase change cooling technology that converts an inert refrigerant, R134a, from a liquid to a gas. The other flexibility is that the liquid-cooled systems can use various chilled or unchilled datacenter water temperatures to pull heat from the R134a subsystem and to adapt to changing datacenter conditions. The phase change coil is more than 10 times as efficient at removing heat from the compute cabinets as a water coil of similar size, so the in-cabinet cooling system is much smaller and lighter than it would be with water coils. Water is only used in external heat-exchange units.

The ECOphlex technology is the first of the Cray “Baker” technologies we're introducing. We'll start using it when we ship the Cray XT5 petascale system to Oak Ridge later this year. After that, all Cray XT5 systems will ship with ECOphlex capability in the new high-efficiency cabinet.

HPCwire: With system sizes and densities increasing, liquid cooling is making headlines as if it were something new, but Cray's been at this a long time.

Scott: We've implemented six different types of liquid cooling since 1976, along with multiple air-cooled implementations. The Cray-1 used Freon with copper cold plates. Then we moved to fluorinert immersion, captive fluorinert cold plates, water cap cooling on the MTA-2, spray evaporative cooling on the X1, a water-cooled radiator on the X2, and the phase change liquid cooling on the XT5 series. We’ve gained a lot of experience with what forms of liquid cooling work best under various constraints.

HPCwire: How does your phase change cooling compare with the typical chilled water scenario datacenters use today?

Scott: Typically today, the computers put the heat into the air, and then the CRAC [Computer Room Air Conditioner] units around the room periphery have to remove the heat from the air and put it into the chilled water. This method is very inefficient. For a petascale system the area taken up by the CRAC units could exceed the computer footprint, and this would also waste a lot of power. Cray’s new cooling scheme puts the heat into a refrigerant stream inside the rack, and then sends it to an Extreme Density Pumping unit that efficiently transfers the heat to the building chilled water. So, you still use chilled water, but it's much less extensive and it doesn't intrude on the computational components of the system.

ECOphlex technology is designed to be "room air neutral" within plus or minus 10%. We’ve demonstrated the ability to remove up to 100 kilowatts from a single cabinet. A typical installation would be configured with just a few CRAC units for humidity control or to deal with some leaking from other devices. The ECOphlex technology requires only a small temperature delta in the water supply, so in cooler climates or where datacenters can run at warmer ambient room temperatures, there is the potential to completely eliminate the need for expensive water chillers.

Another advantage is that since ECOphlex uses an inert coolant, you don't have to worry about water leakage or condensation that could damage electronic components. As you know, this can be a severe problem with intrusive water-cooling technologies that bring the water-cooling close to heat-generating computer components.

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Discussion

There are 1 discussion items posted.

Don't call it green, please.
Submitted by Georg Bisseling on 08/29/2008 - 1:31AM

Having used Freon that destroys the Ozone layer in the atmosphere and is now banned from refrigerators etc. should not be regarded as "having been green before it was cool".

Its more like having been careless as we all have been.

Post #1

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