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SGI Blade Server Goes Green
Four-coil heat exchanger cuts electrical consumption
Charles J. Murray, Senior Technical Editor -- Design News, October 7, 2007
Engineers at Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) have developed a high-performance blade server cooling system that could dramatically reduce electrical consumption and save tens of thousands of dollars a year for data centers.
The new cooling system, used on SGI's Altix ICE 8200 blade server, employs four chilled water heat exchangers on the inside of its exhaust door, potentially enabling the machine to eliminate specialized air conditioners and chillers from data centers.
"The goal is to return air to the data center at a temperature very near to ambient," says Tim McCann, an SGI engineer involved in the design of the cooling system.
The new design, and others similar to it, could be a boon for data centers around the world. Many such centers, built decades ago for different computing environments, suffer from limited power, cooling and space capacity. Using liquid-cooled designs like the ICE 8200, however, those centers could consume far less electricity and pack more computing power into smaller spaces. When the ICE 8200 is teamed with other high-efficiency components, data center electrical operating costs could be reduced 33 percent or more, amounting to approximately $21,000 annually for 10 teraflops of compute power, SGI says.
To be sure, the 8200's liquid-cooling system isn't the first. IBM offers a Cool Blue Rear Door heat exchanger, which is liquid-cooled and SGI has marketed a liquid-cooled door on the 8200's predecessor, the Altix 4700. The new system differs from predecessors, however, in its use of four heat exchanger coils, rather than one. SGI engineers say they used the four coils because they enable the back of the machine to be segmented into four, separate, hinged doors.
"You can pick a quadrant of the machine, swap a blower and do it all with minimal thermal impact to the data center because three-quarters of your cooling is still working," McCann says.
SGI engineers believe their new design could be part of a larger trend toward liquid cooling, mainly because high performance computers are becoming so powerful and releasing so much heat into the ambient air.
"The appetite for computing performance is insatiable and that's going to result in higher heat output over time," McCann says. "But by dissipating that heat into chilled water, there's a savings for the customer and a benefit for the environment."
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 SGI’s Altix ICE 8200 blade server uses a four-coil heat exchanger that could save data centers tens of thousands of dollars in annual electrical costs. |
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