Impact of retrofitted CPU water cooling on supercomputer performance and power consumption
S.J. Ovaska, Roy E. Dragseth, Svenn A. Hanssen · 2016
Water cooling of servers is emerging to high-performance computing (HPC) platforms, not only due to the requirements on effective cooling of high-density server blades, but also for effective recycling of waste heat. In this poster paper, we compare the measurement results of two production-grade HPC racks of the Norwegian Stallo supercomputer: one with air-cooled CPUs and the other with retrofitted direct-to-chip liquid cooling. The performance and power consumption measurements were recorded for computer room temperatures 20-30 °C. It was observed that the median performance measures with water cooling were 0.8-1.4% higher than with air cooling; while the average power consumption with water cooling was 9.4-14.4% lower than with air cooling. During this study, the computation-intensive LINPACK benchmark was executed on all the servers.