TACC Doubles Down on Liquid Immersion Cooling, GRC Delivers
Another Immersed HPC Cluster Solution

Green Revolution Cooling provides the Texas Advanced Computing Cluster with new
GPU-based servers that leverage the cost benefits available with immersion cooling.

AUSTIN, TX – November 13, 2017 – Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) today announced that it will be delivering a custom GPU-based cluster to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). TACC has been a long-time advocate and user of GRC’s immersion cooling technology dating all the way back to 2009, when the technology was first brought to market. The installation has expanded over the years to include more racks and this new order will further build on the existing deployment.

The NVIDIA GPU-based cluster will be made up of GRC’s Minimus Servers designed for immersion. The custom hardware made by GRC in partnership with Supermicro exploits the cost benefits of designing hardware specifically for immersion. By removing thermal constraints, immersion enables simpler layout and removal of components such as fans and intricate chassis designed for air flow.

“What’s interesting about this expansion is the use of servers designed for immersion. Apart from the flexibility it provides us to get exactly the configuration we need, the cost savings that immersion cooling enables [on the hardware side] are extremely impressive.” Said Dan Stanzione, Executive Director of TACC. “Being early adopters of GRC’s immersion cooling system we have seen the technology mature rapidly over the years. And with the growing power and computing needs of AI and machine learning applications, especially with hotter and hotter GPUs, cooling is even more important for reliability.” He added.

As part of the new deployment, GRC will be joining the ‘Science and Technology Affiliates for Research’ (STAR) Industry Partners program. STAR offers opportunities for companies to increase their effectiveness through advanced computing technologies. The mission of this program is to promote a mutually beneficial exchange between industry and academia in advanced computing techniques and technologies, and at the same time foster a framework for technology innovation and support economic development in the state of Texas and across the nation. Through this program, GRC will collaborate with TACC to advance fundamental and applied research and development in the areas of science, technology, and engineering, among others.

“We are excited to see one of the leading HPC organizations in the world, and a long-running customer continue to expand their installation,” said Peter Poulin, CEO at Green Revolution Cooling “TACC has played a significant role in helping us improve our product and make it the mature solution it is today.”

This is the second custom cluster that GRC has announced in as many months, coming off the success of its custom cluster deployment at John Paul Catholic University. “Our goal is to make HPC more affordable. Offering lower cost, energy dense servers that take full advantage of our highly efficient CarnotJet cooling system is a huge benefit to our customers,” said Larry Stone, VP of Engineering at GRC “we are seeing a growing number of people opt for servers designed for immersion, over traditional big brand OEM hardware.” GRC will be showing off its immersion cooling system as well as its Minimus severs at the SuperComputing showing (SC17) in Denver next week (November 12-17) located at booth 1833.

About Texas Advanced Computing Center
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) designs and operates some of the world’s most powerful computing resources. The center’s mission is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. TACC’s environment includes a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure ecosystem of leading-edge resources in high performance computing (HPC), visualization, data analysis, storage, archive, cloud, data-driven computing, connectivity, tools, APIs, algorithms, consulting, and software. In addition, our skilled experts work with thousands of researchers on more than 3,000 projects each year.

About GRC
GRC is the immersion cooling authority. The company’s signature rack-based systems enable cloud and on-premises data centers to reduce cooling energy and save costs. Their unique dielectric fluid coolant eliminates the need for chillers, air conditioners, and air handlers. As the leaders in the data center cooling market, GRC’s solutions have helped some of the largest cloud, HPC, and telecom organizations build extremely efficient, cost effective, and resilient data centers across the globe. Visit grcooling.com for more information.

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GRC’s Oil Immersion Cooling System at PIC Supports Data Processing
for The Large Hadron Collider at CERN

PIC in Barcelona, Spain shares key performance and reliability results from its immersion cooled data-intensive cluster.

AUSTIN, TX – April 19, 2017 – Green Revolution Cooling (GRC), a leader in immersion cooling, today announced key performance and reliability results from its installation at Port d’Informació Científica (PIC) in Barcelona, Spain. The ultra-efficient cluster installed in October 2015 has since been used to process dozens of Petabytes of data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and leading-edge astrophysics projects.

“The GRC system has beaten all expectations in terms of performance and reliability,” said Vanessa Acin Portella, IT Team Leader at PIC “We’ve had zero server or cooling failures in the 18 months that the system has been running.”

GRC’s oil immersion cooling system, as the name suggests, immerses servers in an oil bath. The mineraloil based coolant called ElectroSafe, is an electrical insulator with 1,200x the heat capacity of air, making it ideal for cooling IT equipment. There are several advantages of using immersion cooling over traditional air cooling, this technique eliminates the need for any type of air conditioning or specialized facility design for data centers. This reduces the upfront cost of building a data center facility, while reducing energy use by up to 50%. Apart from the cost savings, the system also helps improve server reliability by protecting them from hot spots, dust, moisture, oxygen, and vibrations.

Another key feature of the PIC facility is that it has zero water consumption. Data center water utilization has been a growing concern lately. Traditional air cooled data centers consume large amounts of water to support chillers and air conditioning systems. GRC’s immersion cooling technology, on the other hand, can eliminate water consumption by using dry coolers instead of evaporative cooling towers in most climates. “Water is the next frontier for data center efficiency and sustainability.” Said Christiaan Best, Founder and CTO of GRC. “Delivering waterless cooling around the year, is just another way we’re helping environmentally conscious customers [like PIC] achieve their data center and sustainability goals.” He added.

“The [GRC] system’s ability to support close to 50kW of IT load per rack, without any air conditioning, refrigerant, or water use is what made it attractive to us,” added Vanessa, “We had limited space, power, and cooling. GRC’s technology made it possible to add capacity in a storage area, while reducing power requirements by 30%.”

Given the superior reliability and performance of the GRC system, PIC plans to explore the use of custom whitebox hardware to further exploit the cost savings offered by the GRC System.

About PIC
Created in 2003, PIC is a joint undertaking of the Spanish and Catalan governments through CIEMAT and IFAE. PIC has been designated by the Spanish government as its LHC Tier-1 centre, and it is the main (Tier-0) data centre for the MAGIC telescope and the PAU dark energy survey. PIC is also a Scientific Data Center for the EUCLID satellite of the European Space Agency and is ramping up its support for the next-generation Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). PIC maintains a transversal innovation activity with many significant results over the years, related to software, hardware, monitoring and energy efficiency.

About GRC
GRC is the immersion cooling authority. The company’s signature rack-based systems enable cloud and on-premises data centers to reduce cooling energy and save costs. Their unique dielectric fluid coolant eliminates the need for chillers, air conditioners, and air handlers. As the leaders in the data center cooling market, GRC’s solutions have helped some of the largest cloud, HPC, and telecom organizations build extremely efficient, cost effective, and resilient data centers across the globe. Visit grcooling.com for more information.

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Liquid Immersion Cooling from Green Revolution Cooling helps Tokyo Institute of Technology Achieve Top Honors at Green500 Three Years in a Row

The latest Green500 list of most efficient supercomputers in the world was announced during the SC15 conference in Austin, Texas. For the third consecutive year, the Green Revolution Cooling-powered Tsubame-KFC supercomputer at Tokyo Institute of Technology has achieved top honors, this year ranking as the most efficient commercially available setup, and second overall.

AUSTIN, TX – December 2, 2015 – The results for the latest edition of the Green500 list of the most efficient supercomputers were announced during the SC15 (Supercomputing 2015) conference held in Green Revolution Cooling’s (GRC), hometown of Austin, Texas, last week. Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Tsubame-KFC super computer, running in Green Revolution Cooling’s oil immersion cooling system came out ahead of a number of past winners as the most efficient commercially available solution, and the second most efficient supercomputer overall. This is the third year in a row in which the system has received top honors on the list, previously being ranked #1 in November 2013, and June 2014.

“This is truly a great win for us, as one of our systems has steadily remained among the most efficient supercomputers for three years in a row. This is unheard of in the highly competitive and fast-changing world of HPC. Tokyo Institute of Technology is a banner customer and we will continue to work with them to break more records,” said Christiaan Best, CEO and Founder of Green Revolution Cooling. Both in November of 2013 and June 2014, the Tsubame-KFC (Kepler Fluid Cooling) system achieved the No.1 ranking on the Green500, also becoming the first supercomputer to break the 4 PFLOPs/W mark, ahead of its nearest competitor by over 20%. In this year’s edition, both of the top systems were immersion cooled, truly
exemplifying the power and efficiency of this method of cooling. While the Tsubame was cooled by Green Revolution Cooling’s mineral oil based ElectroSafe coolant, the RIKEN system was cooled with a 3M Fluorinert fluid in a custom cooling solution.

A recent white paper by Toshio Endo, Akira Nukada, and Satoshi Matsuoka of TI Tech, describes why the Tokyo Institute of Technology chose the GRC solution for the Tsubame-KFC and how the technology played a crucial part in helping TI Tech achieve record breaking efficiency:

“Ahead of overview of TSUBAME-KFC’s cooling technology with warm liquid (oil) submersion, we discuss the cooling methodologies; While submersion cooling has been deployed in the past in machines such as the Cray-2, the Florinate coolant utilized was extremely expensive, and moreover evaporated at low temperature of 56 degrees Celsius, and in fact the vapor was collected to be re-condensed, requiring airtight packaging.”

The complete white paper can be accessed on Green Revolution Cooling’s website at grcooling.com/learning-center/tsubame-kfc-immersion-cooled-greenest-supercomputer/.

About GRC
Green Revolution Cooling creates the most powerful, efficient, cost effective solution for data center cooling in the world. GRC offers the CarnotJet System, a liquid submersion cooling system for any rack-based OEM server. It uses a non-toxic mineral oil with 1,200x more heat capacity by volume than air with end results which allow for 95% less cooling power used, 10-25% less server power used, dramatically reduced infrastructure costs and increased server reliability. Visit grcooling.com for more information.

About Tokyo Institute of Technology – Global Scientific Information and Computing Center
The Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) was established in April 2001 by amalgamating the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Computer Center and the International Cooperation Center for Science and Technology.

GSIC’s missions are to apply advanced information technology to support research and education activities and to use the technology as a medium for promoting research collaboration at an international level. In line with these missions, GSIC has been showing steady results in developing the university’s information infrastructure and supporting its operation, in supporting cutting-edge research in high-performance computation and further research based on its findings, as well as in using it to promote international labor cooperation.

In recognition of GSIC’s achievements, it was designated a Joint Usage / Research Center alongside the seven other similar centers nationwide. Starting April 2010, the GSIC commenced activities as one of the constituent centers of the Japan High Performance Computing and Networking plus Large-Scale Data Analyzing and Information Systems. Visit www.gsic.titech.ac.jp/en for more information.

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Green Revolution Cooling’s Oil Immersion Cooling Technology Helps
Vienna Scientific Cluster Achieve a mPUE of 1.02 with Zero Water Use

AUSTIN, TX – July 2, 2015 – VSC-3, the third iteration of the Vienna Scientific Cluster, is reporting a mechanical Power Utilization Effectiveness (mPUE) of 1.02 as of the end of Q1 2015, making it one of the most efficient data center facilities in the world.

To put the 1.02 mPUE into perspective, the VSC-2, which used a highly optimized rear door solution, achieved a mPUE of 1.18 during the same period. “We are very impressed by the efficiency achieved with this installation. It is particularly impressive given that it uses zero water. We believe this is a first in the industry,” said Christiaan Best, CEO and founder of Green Revolution Cooling (GRC), the company that manufactures the immersion cooling system used by the VSC-3.

VSC-3 uses a closed loop dry cooler as the final method of heat rejection, meaning the syst2em does not require any water input. And while the lack of evaporative cooling may lead to a slight increase in cooling energy during the summer, GRC does not expect the cooling overhead to increase beyond 6% of the IT load.

The ultra-efficient supercomputing cluster, the VSC-3, was installed in 2014, after a unique tender process that accounted for the total cost of ownership of various technologies rather than the usual lowest upfront cost alone. Green Revolution Cooling, together with Intel, ClusterVision, and Supermicro came up with a custom solution that was well ahead of the competition.

The winning solution, pictured above, is made up of 2,020 nodes, each with 16 processor cores housed in the CarnotJet System. The more than 600 teraflops of computing power takes up a mere 540 kilowatts of power and is packed into a little over 1000 square feet of white space.

Green Revolution Cooling’s oil immersion cooling technology gave the bid a number of significant advantages over the competing solutions. Apart from being extremely efficient at cooling the cluster, the GRC system also helped reduce the energy consumed by the servers as well as the upfront build-out cost of the data center, including the cost of the very servers the system cools. “The value proposition [of the GRC system] was extremely impressive. The whole data center and cluster was far less expensive than it would have been with any other cooling solution on the market. We are certain we will be using the GRC solution on more projects in the future.” said Christopher Huggins, Commercial Director at ClusterVision.

The key to GRC’s technology lies in its unique approach of immersing complete servers in a mineral oil based coolant called ElectroSafe, which is a clear, non-toxic, liquid that is an electrical insulator but a good conductor of heat. In fact, it has 1,200 times the heat capacity of air by volume, making it ideal for cooling IT equipment. The superior thermal conductivity and heat capacity of the coolant, as compared to air, helps reduce the energy required to extract heat from nodes in order to maintain optimum core temperatures. The system also completely eliminates the need for capital intensive air conditioning equipment such as chillers, air handlers, humidity control, and even raised floors.

Further, the technology enables hardware optimization such as the removal of fans and intricate chassis, which are no longer required. The removal of fans and reduction in leakage current also allows for the downsizing of power supplies. These hardware optimizations alone saved an estimated $300 per server as compared to an off the shelf solution of similar configuration.

About GRC
Green Revolution Cooling creates the most powerful, efficient, cost effective solution for data center cooling in the world. GRC offers the CarnotJet System, a liquid submersion cooling system for any rack-based OEM server. It uses a non-toxic mineral oil with 1,200x more heat capacity by volume than air with end results which allow for 95% less cooling power used, 10-25% less server power used, dramatically reduced infrastructure costs and increased server reliability. Visit grcooling.com for more information.

About The Vienna Science Cluster
The Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC) consists of several cluster systems that have been designed to satisfy the demand for High Performance Computing (HPC) of a consortium of Austrian universities. At this time there are five VSC partner universities: Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), University of Vienna (Universität Wien), University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU Wien), Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) together with the universities within ‘Universitäts-Cluster-Süd’, and University of Innsbruck (Universität Innsbruck).
Currently two of VSC’s systems are in use: VSC-2 and VSC-3, their oldest system VSC-1 was decommissioned by the end of March 2015. http://vsc.ac.at/

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