Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has introduced a new liquid cooling architecture.
The company this week announced what it said was the industry’s first 100 percent fanless direct liquid cooling (DLC) systems architecture.
Introduced at HPE’s Innovation Center during its AI Day, the company said the new architecture was designed to enhance the energy and cost efficiency of large-scale AI deployments. Benefits reportedly include a 37 percent reduction in cooling power required per server blade, when compared to hybrid direct liquid cooling alone.
“As organizations embrace the possibilities created by generative AI, they also must advance sustainability goals, combat escalating power requirements, and lower operational costs,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “The architecture we unveiled today uses only liquid cooling, delivering greater energy and cost-efficiency advantages than the alternative solutions on the market. In fact, this direct liquid cooling architecture yields 90 percent reduction in cooling power consumption as compared to traditional air-cooled systems. HPE’s expertise deploying the world’s largest liquid-cooled IT environments and our market leadership spanning several decades put us in excellent position to continue to capture AI demand.”
The system architecture features an 8-element cooling design that includes liquid cooling for the GPU, CPU, full server blade, local storage, network fabric, rack/cabinet, pod/cluster, and coolant distribution unit (CDU).
HPE said the architecture includes an integrated network fabric design and an open design to offer flexibility of choice in accelerators.
In a further brochure, HPE said it has previously used fanless Direct Liquid Cooling for its Cray EX supercomputing systems; this method pumps cooling fluid through cold plates through the GPUs, CPUs, memory, and rectifiers eliminating the need for fans. Switches and interconnects in these systems are also water-cooled.
The company said its all-liquid Cray EX cabinet architecture can support chips in excess of 500W.
Supermicro announces liquid cooling offering
Server maker Supermicro this week announced a "complete liquid cooling solution"
The company said the offering includes coolant distribution units (CDUs), cold plates, coolant distribution manifolds (CDMs), cooling towers, and end-to-end management software.
"Supermicro continues to innovate, delivering full data center plug-and-play rack scale liquid cooling solutions," said Charles Liang, CEO and president of Supermicro. "The combination of Supermicro deployment experience and delivering innovative technology is resulting in data center operators coming to Supermicro to meet their technical and financial goals for both the construction of greenfield sites and the modernization of existing data centers. Since Supermicro supplies all the components, the time to deployment and online are measured in weeks, not months."
The liquid cooling solution includes cold plates that dissipate up to 1600W; horizontal and vertical CDMs; CDUs with a cooling capacity of 250kW and hot swappable pumps; modular cooling towers tailored to cool DLC racks; and SuperCloud Composer life cycle management software to monitor the systems.
Earlier this month Supermicro said it would collaborate with Fujitsu to develop liquid-cooled systems for HPC, Gen AI, and next-generation green data centers.
