Exhibitor: Booth #664

Green Revolution Cooling debuted the CarnotJet fluid-submersion cooling system for OEM servers at SC’09 in Portland and was named a Disruptive Technology of the Year. At SC’10, we exhibited an evaluation unit and showcased our ongoing field trials and evaluations at various sites. This year at SC’11 in Seattle we’re proud to highlight our rapidly expanding customer base, our growing number of installations approaching one megawatt of installed cooling capacity, and our successes in extreme GPU cooling and heat recapture.

Featured Event:

Wed Nov 16: Exhibitor Forum: “Fluid Submersion Cooling Field Trial Results and Learnings“

1:30-2:00 PM – Room: WSCC 613/614

Fluid submersion cooling is being used by a growing number of the Top-500 HPC sites around the world, in trials or in larger production systems up to 300kW per site. For these users, there is a path to sustainable Exascale production where cooling energy is cut by 95%, server power is cut by 5-25%, rack densities can reach 100kW per 42U rack, and components such as GPUs can run up to 20°C cooler than in air. One recent installation site in Northern Europe is reducing net data center power to near-zero by recapturing server heat in the form of hot water at 50°C and higher. Christiaan Best, CTO of Green Revolution Cooling, will present findings from two and a half years of customers’ experiences utilizing fluid submersion technology.

Additional Events:

Tues Nov 15th: Poster Session: “A Top-20 Supercomputing Facility Rethinks Its Cooling Efficiency with Fluid-Submersion Cooling”
5:15 – 7:00 PM – Room: WSCC North Galleria 2nd/3rd Floors

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) partnered to solve two common data center inefficiencies: the amount of energy spent cooling servers (relative to powering loads) and the inability to efficiently cool high-density, high-output devices such as blades, GPUs, and servers with over-clocked CPUs. Using Green Revolution Cooling’s fluid submersion cooling solution, the CarnotJet system, TACC and GRC have been conducting efficiency and reliability studies with OEM servers with 100% uptime since April 2010. The self-contained system has demonstrated an 85% reduction in overall cooling energy while using 6 Watts or less per 100 Watts of IT. During overclocking trials, the system successfully dissipated more than 200 Watts per socket while clocking current-generation Intel Xeon processors 35-60% over the base rate. During the poster session, staff from GRC and from TACC will discuss the groundbreaking installation and the petaFLOP installation planned for early 2012.

Sat Nov 12 – Wed Nov 16: Student Cluster Competition
WSCC East Lobby

Students from the University of Texas have partnered with TACC, Dell, Intel, and Green Revolution Cooling to compete to deliver the highest sustained performance across a variety of applications. The UT students will be using GRC’s CarnotJet technology to keep their servers cool as they compete for the SC’11 crown.

For more information, visit the SC’11 website, here.

Green Revolution Cooling staff is currently installing a block of four 42U CarnotJet system racks in a customer’s data center. The installation is located in formerly air-cooled production space.

Following are a few sneak-peak pictures from the installation site. Although the tanks are in place and hooked up to the pump module, servers and coolant have yet to be added.

This picture shows four 42U racks [foreground], one pump module [back left], and a group of air conditioners [back right] left over from the air-cooled systems previously occupying this data center space.

Each pump module can support up to four racks. For each additional block of four racks added to this configuration, an additional pump module will also be installed. Pump modules contain pumps, filters, and heat exchangers.

The raised floor of the data center (although not necessary for a CarnotJet system installation) allows the hoses that connect the racks to the pump module to remain out of sight. Also shown below are the PDUs that mount to the back of the server racks.

The view between two of the racks shows the hoses that deliver coolant to and away from the racks. The hoses connect to two input/output manifolds under the pump module that consolidate (input) and disperse (output) coolant as it enters or exits the pump module.

We’ll have more photos from this installation available in the future, so be sure to check the Gallery soon.

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Two evaporative coolers reject server heat to the atmosphere outside of a Green Revolution Cooling CarnotJet™ system installation.

A new mini-whitepaper produced by Green Revolution Cooling this week explains how wet-bulb temperature is related to evaporative cooling tower efficiency. Using empirical data from two of the hottest regions in the United States, we determined that it’s possible to leverage the efficiency of free cooling in our liquid-submersion cooling system all year long.

You can find the new whitepaper, “Free Cooling in the CarnotJet System: When is it Available?” right here.

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We have some new photos of a multi-rack installation to share this month.

As always, you can find all of our media on the Gallery page.

Six 42U racks filled with coolant and servers and two pump modules in the background. Our standard building block is one pump module and four 42U racks — in this case, each pump module is connected to three racks. The installation is in data center production space.

A single 42U rack with the lid closed. GreenDEF™ fluid coolant does not noticeably evaporate but the lid prevents small particles from mixing with the coolant.

This is the view standing directly in front of the tank. The J-hooks allow for intelligent cable management as well as providing notches to guide service rails, which are used as a platform for servers that have been removed from the coolant.

Side view of servers installed in a 42U rack. The servers hang on two manifolds that run the course of the tank. One manifold is responsible for carrying coolant out of the tank and through the heat exchangers in the pump module (low pressure), and the other is responsible for mixing processed coolant back into the tank (high pressure).

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A Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis installed in a 42U rack with 40kW capacity.

July 8, 2011

Greetings,

Welcome to another installment of the Green Revolution Cooling Newsletter! This edition will cover high-performance cooling for GPU-based systems, support for fiber optics, and new additions to our website, www.grcooling.com.

GPU Computing: Enter Extreme Cooling
As of June 2011, three of the top five supercomputers on the Top-500 list feature GPU accelerators. It’s no surprise that the industry is quickly adopting GPU technology — the tremendous performance potential relative to cost offered by GPU systems is difficult to ignore.

But GPU-based servers can be difficult to cool effectively. As a point of reference, some GPUs run at 300 Watts (compared to ~80 W for a typical CPU) and require as much as twice the power per socket than CPUs. One common solution is to lower rack density in order to compensate for the increased cooling challenge. We believe that this fails to address the root of the problem: lack of cooling power.

Enter fluid submersion cooling. With the extreme cooling potential of the CarnotJet™ system, reliable and efficient GPU cooling has never been easier to achieve. Independent test data has shown GPUs submerged in our system are generally kept 20° C cooler than normal, even when installed in a 42U rack loaded ‘to the brim’ with similar servers.

Write us an email at info@grcooling.com to learn more about our state-of-the-art GPU cooling technology.

Fiber Optics: Favorable results
The initial, favorable results are in from fiber optic testing in the CarnotJet™ system. Independent tests conducted at Midas Networks compared in-air performance of Cisco optical switches with in-coolant performance, using UDP throughput performance tests and minimal interval ping floods.

The tests showed no degradation in transfer times for fiber optic switches submerged in our coolant. In all cases, no pings were lost. GreenDEF™ coolant appears to support fiber optic cable and switches, and we are excited about what this means for future applications.

The full fiber optics report is available upon request.

Website: New Media Added
Since the last newsletter, we have updated our website to include new pictures, videos, and case studies of our installations.

In our Gallery section, you will find pictures of our six current installations, as well as three new YouTube videos, one of which now has more than 35,000 hits!

We have also created a Downloads section, where you can find all of our case studies and materials in one convenient location.

Finally, you’ll see that we have overhauled our Product and Technology sections to provide more insight into GRC’s liquid submersion cooling technology.

Thanks for reading — the next few months will be very exciting for GRC, so stay tuned. And we always look forward to hearing from you, so send us a message at info@grcooling.com with any questions or comments.

Sincerely,

Green Revolution Cooling

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Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) invites you to explore booth #400-4 at International Supercomputing Conference 2011 next week in Hamburg, Germany!

GRC produces an end-to-end cooling solution for OEM servers that utilizes GreenDEF coolant, a non-conductive, non-proprietary formulation of white mineral oil with 1200x the heat retention ability of air. The system supports any OEM server and is capable of slashing cooling energy use by 90-95% and overall data center energy use by 45%. In addition, GRC’s submersion cooling technology is ideally suited for heat recapture and re-use in the form of hot water.

Named a Disruptive Technology of the Year at both SC ’09 and SC ’10, GRC now has five installations in the US and Europe. Recent installations have supported blade servers, Infiniband, fiber optic switches, and GPUs.

Several company representatives will be in the booth to showcase the technology and to answer questions. The booth will feature:

-Demo unit of our liquid-cooled server rack, loaded with servers

-Photos and video from our recent installations

-Information packets in hard copy and on USB drives

For more information, please visit us online at www.grcooling.com. If you will not be able to attend, please send us an e-mail at info@grcooling.com to request our materials.

We hope to see you in Hamburg,

Green Revolution Cooling

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Since the release of the new video on YouTube two weeks ago, Green Revolution Cooling has been featured prominently on several technology blogs and sites. Here are a few recent selections:

Austin Business Journal – Austin Startup Takes Green Approach to Servers:

…[Green Revolution Cooling] is at a milestone. It is putting its cooling system to work in full-scale production after testing it on a small scale for the last nine months.

Forbes.com – Aquarium-Cooled Data Servers

The CarnotJet system, twice named Disruptive Technology of the Year at the International Supercomputing Conference submerges servers in a dielectric, non-conductive fluid called “GreenDEF,” which can absorb more than 1,200 times as much heat as air.

ITBusinessEdge – New Ways to Cool Those Servers

As enterprises continue to experiment with higher operating temperatures and free air and water cooling techniques, a number of new server-cooling designs are starting to hit the channel. One of them is full-submersion liquid cooling, which is essentially dunking entire racks into a specialized liquid cooling medium. Green Revolution Cooling has taken the lead with this concept with its CarnotJet system.

The Tech Report – Immersion Cooling Comes to Data Centers

Immersion cooling dabbles in the sort of extremes we tend to appreciate in the enthusiast community, but its real appeal may lie in data centers. Green Revolution Cooling has deployed immersion cooling in several server environments and posted pictures and videos for all to see.

TreeHugger – 95% Data-Center Cooling Energy Reduction Thanks to Fluid-Submerged Servers

All kinds of industrial machines and processes are liquid-cooled, but strangely, most servers in large data-centers are still air-cooled. This doesn’t make a lot of sense now that cooling costs are often as high, if not higher, than equipment costs. One of the companies working on changing that is Green Revolution Cooling.

As always, you can see what else people are saying about us on the Press Mentions page.

In other news, GRC published another video this week that shows a simple maintenance demonstration for a fluid-submerged server in our CarnotJet™ system. We hope to show that the CarnotJet™ makes it easy to maintain servers that have been submerged in dielectric fluid.

We’re always adding new media to the Gallery, which you can find here.

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We spent some time last week at Midas Networks filming a video that features our recent four-rack, 100kW fluid submersion cooling system.

We were happy to see our video featured on Data Center Knowledge yesterday, where Rich Miller continues to provide great content focused on the data center industry.

You can read more about the Midas Networks installation on our Customers page, where you’ll also find a recent case study. You can also view more pictures and video from this installation and others on our Gallery page.

As our largest CarnotJet™ system installation to date, the Midas Networks installation represents a significant achievement, especially when considering the results.

In mid-2010, when Midas Networks was looking to expand their data center capacity by 100 kW, the company decided it was too expensive to pursue an air-cooling solution. Here is a passage from the case study:

A high profile aircooling vendor quoted Midas Networks $120,000 to purchase and install two twenty-ton Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRACs). All told, Midas Networks would have to spend $180,000 to increase load capacity by 100kW, which includes the CRACs, the cost of optimizing a new room for air-flow and heat management, and a new generator outside to back up the new systems.

With Green Revolution Cooling, Midas Networks realized energy savings and cost savings. Midas lowered upfront and build-out costs while reducing their cooling energy use by 95% and their overall data center energy use by 50%.

If you don’t have time to head over to our Gallery page, make sure to watch our new video below. You can find the rest of our videos in our Gallery or on our YouTube channel.