GRC releases liquid case study

GRC (Green Revolution Cooling) has released a case study on how The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) uses liquid immersion cooling to efficiently cool their new Lonestar6 supercomputer, which handles thousands of academic scientific research projects each year. The case study describes how GRC’s ICEraQ Series 10 Quad single-phase liquid immersion cooling system provides the means for TACC to achieve key scientific advancements by pushing the limits of computing power.

Lonestar6 is highly efficient and handles GPU-heavy compute loads, including HPC, AI, and AR/VR applications. The supercomputer operates at a power density of 70 kilowatts per rack and is capable of performing at 3 petaFLOPS per second. This significant amount of energy, coupled with the triple-digit weather common in the region, requires liquid immersion cooling as air cooling is unable to handle this compute load.

This case study outlines the challenges TACC faced in cooling this supercomputer within their existing space and power envelope and how single-phase liquid immersion cooling proved to deliver a reliable, safe, and environmentally-friendly solution, along with reduced CapEx and OpEx—all with only minimal changes to existing infrastructure.

“GRC’s immersion cooling solution has given us the ability to use the densest servers and hottest chips,” said Tommy Minyard, TACC’s Director of Advanced Computing Systems. “These chassis have 280 W CPUs that run so hot they cannot be cooled by air.”

In addition to the long-term partnership of GRC and TACC (since 2009), the decision to cool Lonestar6 using ICEraQ was based on the solution’s sheer cooling power and GRC’s vast data centre ecosystem. Using GRC’s ICEraQ to cool TACC’s servers, the system delivers a PUE nearing ~1.1 while reducing the facility’s carbon footprint by up to 40%.

“We are excited our longstanding partnership with TACC ensures the researchers and scientists using the Lonestar6 supercomputer have access to the resources necessary to remain at the forefront of scientific research,” says Peter Poulin, CEO of GRC. “GRC’s ICEraQ Series 10 liquid immersion cooling solution enables TACC to reliably and safely cool their supercomputer, while advancing science.”