MEGWARE to Build World's First AMD Cluster with Direct Hot Water Cooling

High-performance computer builder MEGWARE has just announced that it has been commissioned to build the world's first AMD Opteron cluster based on the ColdCon cooling concept, which can reuse some of the waste heat produced by the system for the heating and cooling of rooms and buildings.

The computer will be installed at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Garching, Germany.

The MEGWARE designed cluster system uses direct water cooling for the installed processors as well as chipsets, and was designed to run 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.

"We will use the runback temperatures of 55 °C to 60 °C for the operation of an adsorption refrigerating machine,” said Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode, Director of the LRZ.

“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," conclude Mr. Bode.

The cluster is based on AMD's Magny Cours Opteron processors, the 6128HE to be more precise, which have a clock speed of 2.0GHz and 12 MB of Level 3 cache memory.

Two such processors are installed in each computing node used by the system together with 16GB of DDR3 memory, to deliver a total of 16 cores, and the entire cluster will contain no less than 352 CPUs (or 2816 computing cores).

"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," said Stefano Chiavegati, Head of Channel Marketing at AMD.