The World’s First AMD Cluster System with Direct Hot Water Cooling

Chemnitz, 25 July 2011 – The high-performance computer which will be commissioned at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Humanities at Garching in July 2011 is a unique system and as such a world première. The computing system is delivered by the company MEGWARE from Chemnitz. Based on the innovative cooling concept ColdCon®, it will be possible either to cool the produced waste-heat freely immediately or to reuse it, on account of very high runback temperatures. With this, the system is characterised by an outspokenly high energy efficiency.

A special feature of the cluster system is the direct water cooling of the processors and the chip set. This guarantees an extremely effective cooling of the hot spots. This MEGWARE in-house development can be adapted to different housing systems, main boards and CPU technologies and is therefore very flexible in use. The exchange of individual components is easy and above all safe.

The system runs smoothly at flow temperatures between 25 °C and 45 °C. This results in high runback temperatures and the possibility of freely cooling or reusing the waste-heat produced, e. g. for the generation of heat and cold for the heating and cooling of rooms and buildings. Dr. Herbert Huber, Head of the Group Compute Server at the LRZ has studied the reuse of waste-heat with the use of new and established technologies for several years. His visionary ideas and the inventive genius of MEGWARE’s engineers have now resulted in the creation of an operational installation.

„We will use the runback temperatures of 55 °C to 60 °C for the operation of an adsorption refrigerating machine. This machine produces 11 kW of cooling capacity which is used in turn to cool down conventional IT equipment. Thanks to the double use of the energy, the new cluster is twofold efficient” says Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode, Director of the LRZ.

„We are pleased to see that the LRZ has again decided in favour of MEGWARE. With the implementation of this project, we have together made a great step into an energy-efficient future” underlines Jürgen Gretzschel, Managing Director of MEGWARE.

Stefano Chiavegati, Head of Channel Marketing, AMD (NYSE: AMD) also knows about the importance of energy efficiency: “We are pleased by the way AMD Opteron™ 6128HE processors have helped LRZ to optimize its performance-cost-ratio. And MEGWARE’s innovative method of cooling promises to raise the level of efficiency even further”.

Each node has two bases each of which holds an integrated AMD Opteron Processor of the latest technology. In each base, an 8-Core AMD Opteron Magny Cours 6128HE with 2.0 GHz and 12 MB L3 Cache CPU is integrated. With this, 16 cores will be available in each node, and the overall system will contain 2848 cores. The certified main memories are based on DDR3 technology with 16 GB per system.

Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Brief:
The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) is the IT service provider for Munich’s universities and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. The services of the LRZ are used by a large number of scientific institutions from Germany and abroad. As a result, it has become one of the leading centres for supercomputing in Europe.


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