Germany’s Leibniz Supercomputing Centre has retired its CoolMUC-3 cluster after almost a decade of use.

First deployed in 2017, the system consisted of nine server racks containing Intel Xeon Phi processors, providing 400 teraflops of compute power.

Designed for fluid dynamic simulation, throughout its lifetime, the CoolMUC-3 system supported universities across Bavaria, including the Technical University of Munich and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

The cluster was directly cooled with hot water-based liquid cooling technology developed by Megaware and known as ‘ColdCon.’ In a post on LinkedIn, Megaware said that at the time of the supercomputer’s installation, it was the world’s first high-performance computing (HPC) system with almost 100 percent direct hot-water cooling, with an inlet temperature of at least 40°C (104°F).

“Its fanless design enabled up to 97 percent of the generated heat to be transferred into the water circuit while operating almost silently,” the post read, adding that the CooLMUC-3 cluster functioned as a pilot system for future cooling concepts across HPC environments.

In addition to providing the cooling technology, Megaware also saw the decommissioning of CoolMUC-3. The company said in addition to disposing of systems in an “environmentally responsible” way, it also reuses suitable component parts, where possible.