Can Satellite Technology Cool Computing Clouds?

A diagram of a loop heat pipe (LHP) developed by Passive Thermal Technology.

Can satellite cooling technology allow computing clouds do more for less? Several veterans of the high-performance computing industry believe it can, and recently pitched their technology at the SuperComputing 08 conference in Austin. Their goal: to get a major cloud platform interested in custom 1U servers using their cooling solution.

The technology is a loop heat pipe (LHP), an adaptation of a cooling system used in satellites and gaming PCs. Passive Thermal Technology Inc. has developed a prototype 1U server using the LHP, which removes heat directly from the processor. The company’s technology was developed by CTO Stephen Fried, who is also the president and co-founder of high performance computing vendor Microway.

Fried has been working for several years to adapt heat pipes for use in high-density data center installations. Heat pipes are becoming more common in laptops, game systems and high-performance PCs, and Fried says Passive Thermal already has contracts with several graphics processing unit (GPU) vendors.

But he believes that huge data centers may offer the best value proposition for loop heat pipes. “What we have demonstrated is the ability to cool a data center with no chillers,” said Fried. “We don’t need a water chiller at all, ever.”

There are significant barriers to adoption of heat pipe cooling in data centers. Passive Thermal’s technology is not an exterior “add-on” technology that can be adapted in existing data centers. The heat pipes must be built into servers, and bring water inside the server chassis. Fried is hoping to connect with a server OEM or cloud data center builder that could consider a commitment to custom low-power 1U servers.

Passive Thermal’s loop heat pipe is one of a number of approaches that seek to bring advanced cooling systems inside the server. Existing approaches include on-chip liquid cooling solutions from SprayCool, or IBM’s Hydro-Cluster technology using water-chilled copper plates for processor-level cooling for supercomputers.

Google Sorts 1 Petabyte of Data in 6 Hours

Google has rewritten the record book and perhaps extended the benchmark for sorting massive volumes of data. The company said Friday that it had sorted 1 terabyte of data in just 68 seconds, eclipsing the previous mark of 209 seconds established in July by Yahoo. Google’s effort included 1,000 computers using MapReduce, while Yahoo’s effort featured a 910-node Hadoop cluster.

Then, just for giggles, they expanded the challenge: “Sometimes you need to sort more than a terabyte, so we were curious to find out what happens when you sort more and gave one petabyte (PB) a try,” wrote Grzegorz Czajkowski of the Google Systems Infrastructure Team. “It took six hours and two minutes to sort 1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers. We’re not aware of any other sorting experiment at this scale and are obviously very excited to be able to process so much data so quickly.”

Read more on the Official Google Blog.

A Closer Look at the Kaleidoscope Supercomputer

Yesterday we wrote about the Kaleidoscope Project, which is being hosted in the Houston data center of managed hosting provider CyrusOne. Kaleidoscope harnesses 120 teraflops of computing power to generate digital images of oil reserves buried thousands of feet below the seabed. At right is a closer look at the Kaleidoscope installation, which is powered by 600 IBM PowerXCell 8i processors in eight cabinets that occupy just 22 square feet of floor space, resulting in a power load of 750 watts a square foot in that area of the CyrusOne data center. Kaleidoscope is a collaboration between Repsol; the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (home to the MareNostrum supercomputer); 3DGeo, a Houston-based imaging company formed by Stanford University professor and seismic imaging pioneer Biondo Biondi; and Stanford University’s Stanford Exploration Project (SEP).

Imaging the Earth’s Depths, at 750 Watts a SF

The search for oil on the ocean floor begins on the data center floor. Long before drilling gets underway, the data-crunching commences in places like the CyrusOne data center in Houston, where the Kaleidoscope Supercomputer applies 120 teraflops of computing power to generate digital images of oil reserves buried thousands of feet below the seabed.

Technology plays a critical role in finding oil and gas reserves at Spanish energy company Repsol YPF, which uses Kaleidoscope to identify drilling targets and reduce the risk of an expensive “dry hole.” Offshore wells typically cost at least $15 million, and some large platforms cost many times more. Computer modeling allows oil companies to analyze seismic data and produce 3D images that identify the best location and trajectory for drilling wells. These modeling applications require enormous computing power.

Not every data center can handle the demands of supercomputers like Kaleidoscope, which is powered by 600 IBM PowerXCell 8i processors in eight cabinets that occupy just 22 square feet of floor space in the CyrusOne data center. That works out to 750 watts a square foot of power.

“To meet the Kaleidoscope Supercomputer’s ultra-dense requirements and guarantee optimal installation and future-proof performance, we needed a colocation solution that delivered superior high-density capabilities across the board,” said Francisco Ortigosa, Repsol’s chief geophysicist and project leader.

Design Your Own Virtual Supercomputer

Ever wondered what it’s like to design a supercomputer? Computer science students from Purdue University have created an online game that can provide a virtual taste of the experience. Rack-A-Node challenges players to design and operate a simulated research supercomputer. You must stay within your budget as you fill racks with hardware and complete computing tasks. But watch out for those power loads!

The game was built to highlight Purdue’s participation in the Cluster Challenge at the SC ‘08 supercomputer conference on Nov. 15-21 in Austin, in which college teams compete to see who can build the best supercomputer in a day.

“Rack-A-Node is a game that captures the essence of the supercomputer challenge,” says Kyle Bowen, informatics manager for Information Technology at Purdue. “The player has to optimize the supercomputer for the type of science being performed.”

A Look Inside the CERN Computer Center

CERN is making headlines for the successful launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. While much of the press attention focused on the potential risks of the experiments, there’s also an interesting technology story in the computing infrastructure required to filter, interpret and understand the enormous volumes of data being created. CERN’s LHC experiments will produce roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually – enough to fill more than 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs a year. CERN is collaborating with institutions in 33 different countries to operate a distributed computing and data storage infrastructure known as the LHC Computing Grid. There’s even an LHC at Home program to allow anyone to contribute idle time on their computer to the effort.

CERN also has industrial strength computing infrastructure of its own. We’ve put together a look inside the CERN Computer Center and images of the server and storage supporting the Large Hadron Collider. It’s not surprising that the Geneva, Switzerland facility would have industrial-strength infrastructure - it, after all, the birthplace of the web and home to the first web server. There are also stories today looking at the role of Linux and VMware software in supporting the LHC project.