Watercooling and servers? Boston Limited shows you how!

by Tarinder Sandhu on 13 November 2007, 11:09

Tags: Boston

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Servers are noisy beasts, right? Anyone whose worked in a server environment knows that cooling the multitude of hot-running components requires considerable airflow that's achieved by, in the main, the use of numerous fans. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that server-oriented design is now focussed on increasing density year on year.

Boston Limited, a pan-European distribution partner for SUPERMICRO, is attempting to address the noise problem with its SuperCool water-cooled server. The 1U-sized box ships with Intel's latest Seaburg chipset and can accommodate the chip giant's quad-core 45nm Penryn-based server parts (Harpertown), released yesterday. The SuperServer 6015TW-TS features a 'two-node' design, offering potential 16-core compute power in the low-profile box.

What's far more interesting, however, is the manner by which the processors are cooled. Boston uses a Koolance watercooling solution to wick away the heat from four LGA771 processors, with the reservoir and pump located externally. Power consumption is lowered by up to 30 per cent, Boston states, thanks to the innovative design




The SuperServer 6015TW-TS will be on display at SuperComputing 2007 (SC07) in Reno, Nevada, booth 1229, so take a look if you happen to be present.

Read the press release here


HEXUS Forums :: 10 Comments

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Posted by DR - Tue 13 Nov 2007 11:24
I remember speaking to the Koolance guys when this was revealed at IDF with them hoping for a OEM design win - and clearly one was on the cards.

I'm pleased to see water go mainstream as such - I'd be interested to see how you could plumb in an entire supercomputer…
Posted by Moby-Dick - Tue 13 Nov 2007 11:25
So its go an external pump and reservoir ? Do they go in the rack next door then ?

In an enterprise deployment , noise isn't a factor as the Air con is usually much louder :)

I'd be interested to know if there can lower the overall aircon bill for a data centre - the amount of heat generated by a reasonably densely populated row of servers is pretty high.

Liquid cooling has been used in Datacentres before ( some of the larger A/s 400 units used to be oil cooled IIRC )
Posted by TheAnimus - Tue 13 Nov 2007 12:08
As moby first said, where does this all go?

Space and Power, the two most important factors it seams in datacenters now a days.

if you have just one pump at the top, and a large resivoir at the bottom of a full 48u rack, with all the servers daisy chained off it….. What happens when i want to remove box n for an upgrade? Are there some quick lock instant drip stop connectors?

I'm a watercooling fan myself, but think its a bit of a novelty in a server environment, that would horribly tie you into that one vendor…. don't see it taking off in small doeses!
Posted by Tarinder - Tue 13 Nov 2007 12:11
I'm wondering the same thing, folks. I've seen the Koolance system at IDF, as well.

We'll pull in a Boston representative to give is their take.
Posted by moogle - Tue 13 Nov 2007 16:42
don't think it'd flow in the next rack. it'd just get warmer and warmer and would be pointless isn't it?

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