TSUBAME-KFC: A modern liquid submersion cooling prototype towards exascale becoming the greenest supercomputer in the world

Author

Endo, Toshio ; Nukada, Akira ; Matsuoka, Satoshi

Author_Institution

Global Sci. Inf. & Comput. Center, Tokyo Inst. of Technol., Tokyo, Japan

fYear

2014

Firstpage

360

Lastpage

367

Abstract

Modern supercomputer performance is principally limited by power. TSUBAME-KFC is a state-of-the-art prototype for our next-generation TSUBAME3.0 supercomputer and towards future exascale. In collaboration with Green Revolution Cooling and others, TSUBAME-KFC submerges compute nodes configured with extremely high processor/component density, into non-toxic, low viscosity oil with high 260 Celsius flash point, and cooled using ambient / evaporative cooling tower. This minimizes cooling power while all semiconductor components kept at low temperature to lower leakage current. Numerous off-line in addition to on-line power and temperature sensors are facilitated throughout and constantly monitored to immediately observe the effect of voltage/frequency control. As a result, TSUBAME-KFC achieved world No.1 on the Green500 in Nov. 2013 and Jun. 2014, by over 20% c.f. the nearest competitors.

Keywords

cooling towers; evaporation; frequency control; green computing; leakage currents; parallel machines; power aware computing; temperature sensors; voltage control; Green500; TSUBAME-KFC; ambient cooling tower; compute nodes; cooling power; evaporative cooling tower; flash point; frequency control; future exascale; green revolution cooling; greenest supercomputer; high processor/component density; leakage current; liquid submersion cooling prototype; modern supercomputer performance; next-generation TSUBAME3.0 supercomputer; nontoxic low viscosity oil; online power; semiconductor components; temperature sensors; voltage control; Cooling; Power measurement; Servers; Supercomputers; Temperature measurement; Temperature sensors;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), 2014 20th IEEE International Conference on

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PADSW.2014.7097829

Filename

7097829