tahawultech.com
Summary
As the power demand for high-performance computing (HPC) increases, the chilled solution to avoid overheating thousands of servers turns out to be their own wastewater.
The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich, Germany, is no ordinary supercomputer. Sure, there are thousands of servers, or nodes, stacked in rows in a windowless vault. As technicians look on, they’re all working away on huge data crunching conundrums for research organisations, running simulations to try and better predict future natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes.
But it’s eerily quiet. Almost too quiet. The familiar whir of hot air being whooshed away by power hungry computers is almost entirely absent. Where are all the fans?
Almost all gone, as it turns out. The LRZ SuperMUC NG, which uses massive arrays of Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SD650 servers, requires nearly no fans at all – just those for cooling the power supply units and in the in-row-chillers on every eighth row remain.
As a result, “the ambient noise in the datacenter is now lower than in a typical office space,” says Rick Koopman, EMEA Technical Leader for High Performance Computing at Lenovo.
Despite this, Lenovo has been able to keep the LRZ running all this time while overseeing energy reduction levels of 40 percent, greatly lowering the centre’s electricity bill and environmental impact at the same time. “We wanted to optimize what we put into a supercomputer and what comes out of it from an efficiency perspective,” he says.
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