BRITISH SERVER COOLING FIRM Iceotope has developed a cooling system in partnership with Intel designed for high performance computing and supercomputing.
Claiming to be the “best-in-breed liquid cooling system”, Iceotope’s PetaGen, short for ‘Peta-Generation’, uses fewer energy resources than a traditional system and ensures that cooling accounts for just two percent of a data centre’s overheads as opposed to almost half, according to the firm.
PetaGen refers to petascale computing, a term the firm says applies to the current generation of the world’s fastest supercomputer systems.
The cooling technology was developed with Intel to cool its latest processor chips, something which many other liquid cooling platforms have failed to do owing to the considerable heat output of top-end IT components.
“PetaGen is a full production total liquid cooling solution that improves IT performance, energy efficiency and density, whilst reducing total cost of ownership and data centre complexity,” Iceotope said.
PetaGen cuts data centre energy use and carbon emissions via a reduced infrastructure footprint, increases IT performance per watt through cooling components and enabling the use of turbo modes, and, unlike most IT server designs, does not need to evaporate or waste clean water.
PetaGen uses Iceotope’s inert coolant liquid called Novec made by 3M, as seen in its fully immersed liquid cooled server system.
This liquid is the core technology involved in the servers as it is non-conductive and has a low dielectric constant allowing electronics to be submerged in the solution.
“Without any spinning fans, PetaGen units are virtually silent in operation and can also be deployed in populated labs and offices,” explained Iceotope.
“It is within such spaces that the possibility of heat reuse becomes increasingly valuable.
“PetaGen creates waste heat in the form of hot water, allowing input temperatures of up to 45C which enables coolants so hot that they can be used in a variety of applications close to the IT deployment, such as heating buildings.”
Iceotope claims that PetaGen is unlike any other liquid cooling system because it can cool top-end processors, which lets customers take advantage of more powerful computing resources, such as those needed for big data analytics and cloud computing.
“The results are equally impressive when comparing PetaGen to traditional air cooled IT environments, especially in terms of IT density,” claimed the firm.
“Normal air cooled facilities operate at up to 2.6kW per square metre and require large quantities of internal and external supporting infrastructure.
“Iceotope’s patented technology increases density by fitting in more devices, reducing IT infrastructure and increasing IT performance.”
PetaGen is available in various cabinet sizes, and supports up to 72 blade servers per cabinet and up to 60kW of power and cooling.
The modular design also decreases the amount of floor space needed, typically offering 7.4kW-14kW of IT per square metre.