I work as a Thermal Application Engineer in 3M’s Electronic Markets Materials Division.  For more than 50 years, my group has made fluorochemical heat transfer fluids that have been used for immersion cooling of high value electronics.  Some are familiar with the various Fluorinert™-cooled Cray supercomputers but our fluids are also used in tens of thousands of immersion cooled traction inverters and a variety of military platforms.  

Evaporative immersion is arguably one of the most efficient ways to implement fluids like ours for cooling electronics.  Heat sources on a PCB immersed in the fluid cause that fluid to boil.  This captures all heat and allows it to be transferred efficiently to air or water via a secondary condenser.  Historically, immersion systems of this type have used sealed pressure vessels with hermetic electrical connections and are evacuated and filled much like refrigeration systems.  Because it can be costly to create such an enclosure for computational electronics with a lot of IO, Engineers often dismiss the idea of immersion in the context of commodity datacenter equipment.  The concept we are promoting (see attached) eliminates these complexities.  Other advantages are summarized below.

- All server level and most rack level cooling hardware are eliminated
     – reduced environmental impact (landfill)
     – simplified server/rack design 
     - reduced cooling equipment cost 
     - no moving parts to fail or leak

- Essentially no thermal limit on server power density 
     - 4 kW/liter (4 MW/m³) has been demonstrated (>100X typical air cooled and >25X typical supercomputer) 
    -  possibility for reductions in raw material usage (PCB, etc) 

- Intrinsic fire protection

We are demonstrating this concept with real computing hardware but because we are using off-the-shelf air cooled components, the power density merits of this technology cannot be realized and the demonstration will lack luster.

We seek partners with challenging-to-cool hardware and an interest in exploring this technology.  We believe it could be a transformative technology enabling the next-generation power density goals of the HPC industry.

Readers can learn more at:

http://www.ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/searchresult.jsp?newsearch=true&queryText=tuma+open+bath+immersion

or write to me for an Overview Presentation.  Thank you and Best Regards,

Phil E. Tuma
petuma@mmm.com
3M Electronics Markets
Materials Division

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First up: The HPC Advisory Council and the Swiss Supercomputing Centre will host the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Workshop 2010  in the Lugano Convention Centre, Lugano, Switzerland, from March 15-17, 2010. This is an excellent training and educational opportunity for European-based, HPC and data center IT professionals (See AGENDA). Attendance is FREE and registration is now OPEN.

Second: The HPC Advisory Council will hold the 2010 European Workshop on May 30th, 2010, in conjunction with the ISC’10 conference in Hamburg Germany. The workshop will be a full day workshop, and will include coffee breaks, lunch and dinner, courtesy of the HPC Advisory Council. Attendance to the workshop is a nominal fee of  30€ . Register today for the conference by clicking on the Council Workshop box when registering for ISC.

More workshop are being planned for the second half of 2010. Stay tuned for more info.

Hope to see you all there,

Brian Sparks

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With that, I wanted to draw your attention to a partnership between Platform and Instrumental to advance High Performance Cloud Computing for the Government Sector.  The partnership enhances Platform’s global service capabilities and gives users an end-to-end, full service solution that maximizes the value of Platform’s private cloud management and HPC cloud-enabling software solutions, Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster.  The full press release can be seen here. 

Dave Ellis
Principal Technologist
Instrumental, Inc.

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In summary, there are a large number of HPC applications that need the lowest possible latency for best performance or the highest bandwidth (for example Oil&Gas applications as well as weather related applications). There are some HPC applications that are not latency sensitive. For example, gene sequencing and some bioinformatics applications are not sensitive to latency and scale well with TCP-based networks including GigE and 10GigE. For HPC converged networks, putting HPC message passing traffic and storage traffic on a single TCP network may not provide enough data throughput for either. Finally, there is a number of examples that show 10GigE has limited scalability for HPC applications and InfiniBand proves to be a better performance, price/performance, and power solution than 10GigE.

The complete report can be found under the HPC Advisory Council case studies or by clicking here.

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The workshop was well organized by Ada Gavrilovska (Georgia Tech) and Pavan Balaji (Argonne National Lab) with the help from Steve Poole (Oak Ridge National Lab). Other interesting sessions were given by Nagi Rao (ORNL) on wide area InfiniBand, James Hofmann (Naval Research Lab) on Large Data project, Hari Subramoni (The Ohio State University) on InfiniBand RDMA over Ethernet (LLE) and others.

The next council event is the HPC China workshop. More data on the workshop is posted at – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/china_workshop/

Gilad Shainer HPC Advisory Council Chairman
gilad@hpcadvisorycouncil.com

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twitter.com/hpccouncil

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I have presented a paper on “LS-DYNA Productivity and Power-aware Simulations in Cluster Environments”. The paper was written by Mellanox, Dell and AMD with the help of Sharan Kalwani from GM and LSTC. The paper covers clustering interconnect analysis, CPUs performance, application and networking profiling and providing recommendations for increasing productivity (or jobs per day) while reducing power and cooling expenses. The paper can be downloaded from the “content/conferences” section on the HPC Advisory Council web site.

There were some very interesting sessions at the conference (beside mine …J). The automotive makers have expressed their need to be more economical and ecological (without compromising the brand names), the challenges of light weight design, increase demands from regulations, new materials, alternative drive engines, cost efficiency, increase safety, design of energy management equipment and much more. All of those items continue to increase the need for more simulation and higher complexity in order to create a design that fulfills those requirements and enables faster solution time to market. The paper that I presented provides information and guidelines on how to build next generation systems from one side, and how to optimize current systems for higher productivity on the other.

I also did manage to find some time in the late evening, and walk throughout the old city of Salzburg and see the house that Mozart was born in. It is a lovely city, with many sight seeing and nice places to sit down and drink beer (or coke, if you know me….).

Regards,

Gilad Shainer
HPC Advisory Council Chairman

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The workshop was organized very well, and it was a great opportunity to meet and talk with many oil and gas users, as well as software and hardware vendors. In spite of the current recession, users still need to stay competitive and to increase their productivity. So new investments are definitely being made, but those investments are being carefully designed to ensure maximum ROI, and must certainly be future proofed.

The HPC Advisory Council presented recent work performed by its members – Gilad Shainer & Tong Liu (Mellanox Technologies), Joshua Mora (AMD), Jacob Liberman (Dell) and Owen Brazell (Schlumberger) on “ECLIPSE: Performance Benchmarking and Profiling”. Schlumberger’s ECLIPSE Reservoir Engineering software is a widely used oil and gas reservoir numerical simulation suite. Maximizing end-user productivity with ECLIPSE requires a deep understanding of how each component impacts the overall solution. Moreover, as new hardware and software comes to market, design decisions are often based on assumptions or projections rather than empirical testing. The presentation was targeted to removes the guesswork from cluster design for ECLIPSE by providing best practices for increased performance and productivity. The presentation included scalability testing, interconnect performance comparisons, job placement strategies, and power efficiency considerations.

The presentation can be downloaded from the HPC Advisory Council web (technical content/conferences section).

Commodity clusters, CPUs and interconnects can together provide the most efficient and productive systems for high-performance applications. The secret is in gathering the right components to create a balanced system, and with the right components and integration, one can maximize the system’s capability and to ensure system and application scaling. For more information in particular to ECLIPSE, please review the presentation.

For more questions and comments, we can be reached (as always) at HPC@mellanox.com.

Best regards,

Gilad, Chairman of the HPC Advisory Council

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