Immersive liquid cooling makes another appearance at a student cluster competition. Yay! Team Sooner brought the big Green Revolution mineral oil vat to cool their small collection of nodes.
The video begins with a behind-the-scenes discussion of the merits of liquid nitrogen for cooling applications. We weren’t talking about it for use in the competition, but maybe if someone could wrangle a sponsorship from a liquid nitrogen maven, it could become reality…
Team Sooner is settling into the competition like most first-time teams – the typical “excitement and stress,” as one student put it.
UO is the third team to run with immersive cooling, but they’ve put a twist on it. Rather than use a smallish enclosure to match their modest cluster, Team Sooner went with a full 42U rack immersion tank from sponsor Green Revolution.
As you’ll see in the video, the five-node Team Sooner cluster takes up barely any room at all in this huge container – exactly what the team was aiming for.
With their current setup, the team hardly has to run the pump and fan at all. They’re essentially using the massive reservoir as a heat sink, which they figure gives them enough extra juice to allow for another node.
The students view this outing as an alpha test of their system design and clustering prowess. They see successive teams building on this foundation and, eventually, humbling the Texas Longhorns.
Posted In: Latest News, SC 2014 New Orleans
Tagged: supercomputing, Student Cluster Competition, HPC, SC 2014, University of Oklahoma, Meet the teams