CoolIT Systems Shows Off Direct Contact Liquid Cooling Solutions for HPC Servers and Data Centers

What is in a name?  The answer is quite a bit if it is descriptive. And, falling into that category is CoolIT Systems, a leading supplier of Direct Contact Liquid Cooling (DCLC™) technologies. Yes, this is a real plumbing company when it comes to data center transformations, but reality is that plumbing is important. In fact, just how so is being demonstrated by CoolIT Systems at the SC14 international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis show in New Orleans.

CoolIT Systems has been highlighting its 7 rack liquid cooled data center plus multiple displays of liquid cooled servers from SuperMicro, Dell, Cisco, Penguin Computing and Boston. In fact, it also chose the venue to debut a unique Quick Disconnect Auto Ejection system that enables the capability to instantly disconnect and ensure isolation of a server in the unlikely event that system integrity is compromised.

Another product aimed at keeping data centers cool that was there for evaluation was CoolIT’s DCLC product line-up of data center-ready CHx650 coolant heat exchange system, with a capacity to manage cooling for over 650kW of computing per network, along with the rest of the company’s line of Rack DCLC™ liquid and air heat exchangers.

“The momentum at Supercomputing from vendors and end users for liquid cooling grows annually with the increase in rack density and efficiency requirements,” said Geoff Lyon, CEO/CTO of CoolIT Systems. “We are responding to this demand with our largest display ever of enterprise level liquid cooling solutions.”

In addtion to its own demonstration, CoolIT Systems partnered with Boston Limited demonstrating a CPU & GPU liquid cooled cluster featuring the CoolIT AHx20 liquid-to-air system that delivers 20kW of cooling without any requirement for facility water. As the company points out, this solution enables stand-alone liquid cooled racks of high performance, super high density racks. It was first demonstrated at the ISC14 Leipzig event in conjunction with EPCC at University of Edinburgh as part of the student cluster competition, and the EPCC team won the LINPACK challenge with a score in excess of 10TFLOPS for only 3kW of power consumption.

Plumbing does not have to be boring. Given the size and scope of hyperscale data centers and all of their cooling and other energy requirements having an advanced, low footprint cooling solution that allows for dramatic increases in rack densities, component performance, and power efficiencies is the kind of plumbing that is going to be required as data centers of all sizes and not just the biggest, continue to grow and look for every means possible to be cost-efficient, particularly when it comes to energy consumption which is a huge part of their fixed operational costs. The technology can be deployed with any server and in any rack making it a truly flexible solution that allows for an edge in today's highly competitive marketplace. 

Edited by Maurice Nagle