No experience yet but our new IBM P575 installation will use these or
something similar. We don't have sufficient residual forced air cooling
to deal with 640 P5+ CPUs in our campus data center and our plans for
dedicated HPC space on campus are still embryonic. I'll relate our
experiences.
WRT noise load, the "cost" of another Leibert is trivial compared to the
case fans we'll still have to endure on the new system. I've heard
numbers in excess of 87 dBa for this system, necessitating hearing
protection now for anyone entering the data center space.
gerry
Bruce Allen wrote:
Dear Beowulf list,
For my next cluster room, I am hoping to use 'liquid cooled' racks make
by Knurr (CoolTherm, http://www.thermalmanagement.de/). The scale is 67
racks x 7.5kW heat removal per rack (36 U usable per rack).
Does anyone on the list have experiences with these or similar racks
(you can reply to me privately if you don't want to share your
experiences publicly)? I am told that there are lots of installations
in Europe, especially in Germany, but that the only US sites are at Penn
State, somewhere in the Chicago area, and U. of Vermont, and that these
US installations are fairly small-scale.
The racks have front and back doors that close, and contains fans in the
back which circulate air through a heat exchanger located in the bottom
of the rack. The heat exchanger transfers the heat into chilled water.
The advantages of this are that it is quiet, and that you don't need
vertical height for underfloor ducting or overhead hot air removal.
Disadvantages are cost, potential difficulty of working within the rack.
and loss of one rack of cooling capacity if you open both the front and
back doors.
(In this case I have access to 'building' funds that can not be used to
buy more cpus, so the cost issue is not important.)
I would be very interested to hear about people's experiences with these
racks (or similar ones from another manufacturer) in an HPC environment.
Cheers,
Bruce
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Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
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