The design of a reduced ambient temperature, air cooled supercomputer

The authors summarize the forces which drive the packaging design of a supercomputer. They focus on using controlled junction temperature cooling of CMOS VLSI as an approach to obtaining improved performance. A cursory review of heat transfer physics is given, borrowing ideas used in heat exchanger design from the process industry. Some specific examples are discussed: finite-element solutions to level-0 and -1 package conduction problems and experimental solutions to air-flow problems at both the heat sink and card/cage/system (levels 2, 3, and 4). It is noted that the very high level of integration possible using 1.0-μm CMOS allows implementation of the entire logic of a supercomputer in a small number of chips, allowing more complex, parallel architectures with large shared memory to be developed