Iceotope, the environmental cooling specialist, has announced the installation of its liquid-cooled servers inside the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) in Poland, a 3,200sq ft colocation facility offering shared HPC services to scientists, universities and researchers from around the world.
The installation is part of the European PRACE Research Project (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) and was completed in June 2013. Since then, the Iceotope and PRACE teams have been running the systems on ‘turbo mode’ and collecting data on its environmental performance, the results of which have the potential to substantially reduce the environmental footprint of supercomputing operations.
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 company says the results have been impressive – with energy-efficiency, operational, performance and utilisation benefits compared to traditional air cooled servers and other forms of liquid cooling.
