Submer offers a series of Immersion Cooling and smart energy solutions to help datacenters, supercomputers and hyperscaler achieve sustainable innovation being highly efficient and, at the same time, environmentally friendly.

Be Innovative, Be Sustainable!

Twice a year, the website Top500 releases a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. In 2020, Fugaku, the Japanese computing cluster won this very peculiar race of the world’s fastest supercomputers. In fact, there are two other less discussed lists that are published together with the Top500: the High-Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) and the Green500. This last is the list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. So, one might argue, what is more important, to be fast or to be energy efficient? Can’t a supercomputer be both?

A Not-so Smart Business… yet!

Our mission at Submer is to build Datacenters that make sense. What do we mean by that? That’s simple if you consider a few basic facts:

• Datacenters are responsible for 1% of the world’s electricity consumption^[1] and about 0.5% of CO₂ And, as recently confirmed by Science^[2], from 2010 to 2018, the skyrocketing growth of storage capacity, network traffic and computing volumes, determined a +6% increase in the energy consumption of datacenters. The IT and digital sector accounts for 2.3% of global gas emissions^[3], being one of the main polluting industries along with transportation, agriculture, automobile, fashion industry, food retail, fuel industry and construction^[4].
• From an operational standpoint, about 40% of the electricity consumption of a traditional HPC cluster is determined by cooling.
• 99% of the datacenter industry still relies on air cooling as the main solution to cool its servers.
• The average power density has increased from 4-5 kW (about 10 years ago) to 5-15 kW^[5]. In 2012, the highest density racks the organization could find were consuming 26 kW. “Last year, ten per cent of respondents to the Uptime Institute data centre survey reported that they were running some of their racks at above 40 kW^[6].”

These are not biased opinions. These are objective figures and facts that tell us that the already existing datacenters and even those which are planned and still not built, are not that smart.

Clearly, by “smart”, we mean that they are clinging to old school models and sustainability still remains one of the last priorities, sacrificed in the name of efficiency, reliability, redundancy, and security (all equally essential aspects in a datacenter). We think the industry can do better, and Submer has the technology to help datacenters, supercomputers and hyperscale be more efficient and sustainable.

Submer’s Immersion Cooling and Smart Energy Solutions

Submer has designed a highly efficient solution that perfectly fits with the needs of HPC applications.

The SmartPod Immersion Cooling system, thanks to its design and the use the SmartCoolant,

our proprietary synthetic dielectric fluid for single phase Immersion Cooling, allows for:

• Unprecedented IT hardware density in a compact space (up to 100 kW in a SmartPodXL+ configuration).
• A +30% in HW life-span and a -60% in HW failure (thanks to the SmartCoolant that, apart from whisking the heat away from the IT hardware, protects the HW from particles, dust, humidity and any other agent that might affect it).
• Leveraging open HPC standards like OCP.
• Reducing latency and increase speed deployment also in harsh environments.
• A 25-40% TCO saving (with a consequent positive impact on CAPEX and OPEX).
• A smart energy footprint, with a PUE <1.03 anywhere on the globe and >97% of power used just to run compute and not cooling.
• Simplified secondary cooling and node design (no fans, basic heatsinks, etc.)
• Zero water consumption and 99% of energy captured with potential for re-use.

Welcome to the Smart DC

At last OCP Tech Week, Scott Noteboom (CTO of Submer) presented the Network Backplane, the result of the Out-of-sight project, a strategic and technical collaboration with Samtec and 2CRSi.

The Network Backplane is just one of the smart energy and automated solutions we have designed to help our customers reach high density and life-cycle reliability improvements, and unprecedented levels of efficiency and security in an easily scalable and sustainable way.

The Network Backplane is just the first step towards smart datacenters and has been conceived to:

• Offer a reference design compatible with traditional and OPC servers.
• Facilitate autonomous serviceability of networking and server nodes.
• Take intra-rack communication to the next level and enable a new generation of TOR switch density gains.

“When we launched the Smart DC project, we wanted to offer datacenters, hyperscalers and supercomputers a series of solutions to help them improve their energetic and operational efficiency. This clearly have strong benefits for their TCO. And obviously, we have developed these solutions with our core sustainability values, allowing for a reduction in terms of electricity and water consumption and CO₂ emissions.” (Pol Valls Soler, Co-founder, and CIO of Submer).

Smart innovation can only be sustainable. If you want to know more, get in touch with us and let’s build together datacenters that make sense.

Matteo Mezzanotte
PR, Communication & Content Manager
[email protected]
submer.com

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^[1] https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/la-consommation-electrique-des-data-centers-t-elle-ete-surevaluee-200304

^[2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6481/984.full

^[3] https://www.data4group.com/en/csr/how-do-we-reduce-the-environmental-footprint-of-data-centers/#:~:text=In%20terms%20of%20the%20environmental,2018%2C%20their%20performance%20grew%20phenomenally.&text=This%20generated%20a%206%25%20rise%20in%20energy%20consumption

^[4] https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/blog/top-7-most-polluting-industries

^[5] https://datacenterfrontier.com/power-quality-management-data-centers-2/

^[6] https://datacenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/2018-data-center-industry-survey.pdf