Climate problems in big clustersMunich 12 December 2002 In big clusters with lots of nodes, the air cooling can become a problem. As one of the DataGrid Centres, the Research Centre Karlsruhe (RCK) will run into these difficulties. Manfred Alef, RCK, presented a water cooling solution. Robert Gattereder, m + w Zander, discussed an industrial solution.
As RCK will use lots of CPUs in a relatively small room, 10 KW of heat has to be transported out of each rack. There are two solutions, one cools the CPUs directly, which means hundreds of tubes in a cabinet. The other uses air/water in a cabinet. A heat exchanger cools the air using water, which can be cooled outside the cabinet. Manfred Alef mentioned that dual Xeon need 160 Watt, the next generation about 320. They started running a prototype in October 2002. The warm air is sucked in at the top of the cabinet, the heat exchanger gives the heat to the water. They calculated that about 2200 cube meters/hour have to be circulated. Now, they will improve the prototype by a better circulation.
Robert Gattereder compared cluster cooling. It is the same as in an opera hall, where 100 people occupy one seat. He gave some examples of modular cooling systems and new buildings. The data cube is a 100 square meter box with 60 square meter utility space and a generator on top. Another aspect is that over a time frame of 15 years 1/3 is investment and 2/3 operation cost. To cool 5 KW costs 3000 euro/square meter. He hinted to free cooling, using the environment. In Germany, about 6000 hours per year the temperature outside is less than 14 degrees Celsius.
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