Iceotope liquid-cooled supercomputer operates at 95 percent utilisation with near-perfect PUE

The PRACE research project is an international not-for-profit association set up to support high impact scientific discovery and engineering research, with a strong interest in reducing the environmental impact of computing systems. Iceotope is one of three winning participants in PRACE’s new liquid cooling research project, which involves testing and comparing a variety of different liquid cooled solutions – with the aim of exploring their environmental benefits compared to traditional air cooling. Iceotope was awarded the tender with PRACE ahead of a rival bid from IBM, and has since installed 46 of its environmentally-friendly and high performance blade modules alongside existing legacy air cooled servers. So far, the results for Iceotope have been impressive – with massive energy efficiency, operational, performance and utilisation benefits compared to traditional air cooled servers, and even other forms of liquid cooling.

Green supercomputers – Iceotope achieves a 1.03 PUE
With the ultimate objective of finding the most environmentally friendly computing systems, each system tested has been given a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) figure as part of its overall environmental rating. Iceotope’s 1.03 figure is on a par with Facebook and Google’s industry leading data centre facilities and means that for every Kilowatt of energy that reaches the computer, 95% is available for computing with no losses for fans etc.
Three months of ‘environmental overclocking’

“At the PSNC, we are able to overclock the machines and still use minimal power resources for cooling; no easy feat, I can assure you,” said Iceotope founder and CEO, Peter Hopton. “Typically, data centre facilities will run their servers at around 40% utilisation, meaning that 60% of potential compute capacity remains unused. At Poznan PSNC, however, the Iceotope system was set up to run at above 90% utilisation, running a highly demanding ‘Linux Stress’ software programme designed to assess every aspect of compute including memory, CPU, servers and applications. The system has been running for periods of up to three months while undergoing testing of the system, the cooling and the high speed networking.

“Running at such a high utilisation rate, or overclocking as it commonly known, means that IT users can run their systems in ‘turbo mode’ and get higher performance rates. However, this is the complete opposite to how most environmentally friendly IT systems are run as doing so requires the electronics to operate at much higher temperatures. To avoid damage to the equipment, cooling equipment capable of providing a constant temperature must be used and more often than not this is a power-hungry option. This high utilisation with low cooling cost makes the environmental figures we achieved all the more impressive,” continued Hopton.

Whilst most IT professionals will employ ‘underclocking’ techniques, with very low utilisation rates, in order to minimise power usage; Iceotope’s 1.03 PUE figure was calculated during several two week periods where systems were running full-time at over 90 percent utilisation. The majority of liquid cooling solutions in the market today are unable to operate over such long periods, and many require constant supervision during the periods in which they are running. Iceotope’s system does not. The Iceotope Solution is decoupled at the module, cabinet and data centre level, offering 2N redundancy throughout and levels of reliability only found in air cooled servers until now.

“Acting as a platform to demonstrate this kind of technological evolution is exactly what our project was set up to do,” said Radek Januszewski, IT Specialist at the PSNC. “We set up this research project in an effort to establish the benefits of liquid cooling and the results we’ve seen so far are incredible. I see no reason why people would buy air cooled systems ever again. We’re trying to educate European HPC users of the most environmentally friendly forms of IT and in that regard, the Iceotope project has been a massive success. The environmental rating of the system is incredible and coupled with the impeccable performance and reliability that it delivers - it is a real game-changer.”

“The PRACE project is a fantastic initiative,” said Hopton. “While the average person may not necessarily realise it, HPC is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our everyday lives. Supercomputers like the one in Poznan are crunching data 24/7, the kind of data which is often forgotten about but is imperative for our ‘always on, always connected’ lifestyles. The environmental impact of processing such vast amounts of data is also largely unseen and PRACE is fulfilling a vital role in educating those operating these facilities as to how they can do so in the most environmentally friendly way possible.”