Supermicro and
Green Revolution Cooling have teamed with an energy research company to create a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster featuring servers that are accelerated by GPUs and immersed in a liquid cooling solution.
The 24-rack installation at
CGGVeritas in Houston is the largest deployment to date of Green Revolution’s CarnotJet cooling racks, which are filled with 250 gallons of dielectric fluid, with servers inserted vertically into slots in the enclosure. Fluid temperature is maintained by a pump with a heat exchanger using a standard water loop.
The CGG Veritas system uses Supermicro servers accelerated by dual graphics processing units (GPUs) and optimized for a submerged environment. The result is a powerful and highly-efficient cluster with densities of 25 kilowatts per rack, which doesn’t require room-level cooling and operates at a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.12.
Platform for Oil and Gas Exploration
The new HPC platform allows
CGGVeritas [1] to dramatically accelerate its data-intensive seismic survey analysis, which is used by energy companies to evaluate underground areas for oil and gas exploration.
“The CarnotJet system has enabled CGGVeritas to implement a tremendously powerful GPU-accelerated cluster at a very attractive cost,” said Christiaan Best, Technical Founder of
Green Revolution Cooling [2] (GRC). “ We’re pleased that Supermicro has provided submersion-ready servers that perform extremely well in the system. We look forward to the continued expansion of the submersion cooling data center at CGGVeritas.”
Supermicro’s 1U dual-GPU SuperServer (SYS-1026GT-TF) was chosen for its high-density computing power and overall capacity to maximize performance and energy-efficiency in the fluid-cooled racks. Each 42U Green Revolution rack contains 40 Supermicro GPU SuperServers.
“In conjunction with GRC’s submersion technology we are able to push operational limits of our GPU-based SuperServers even further while effectively reducing overall energy requirements,” said Dr. Tau Leng, General Manager of HPC at
Super Micro Compute [3]r. “This joint solution delivers CGGVeritas supercomputing performance with enhanced PUE for their unique data acquisition and analysis applications.”
Green Revolution’s first unit was installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, home to the Ranger supercomputer. Subsequent installations have been at Austin ISP
Midas Networks [4], and the
Royal Institute of Technology [5] in Stockholm.
Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.
Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com
URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/03/22/submerged-supermicro-servers-accelerated-by-gpus/
URLs in this post:
[1] CGGVeritas: http://www.cggveritas.com
[2] Green Revolution Cooling: http://www.grcooling.com/
[3] Super Micro Compute: http://www.supermicro.com
[4] Midas Networks: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/08/25/colocation-company-will-submerge-servers/
[5] Royal Institute of Technology: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/11/14/submerged-servers-can-now-heat-your-office/
[6] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/
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