HUD-Oden: A Practical Evaluation Environment for Analyzing Hot-Water Cooled Processors
Jorji Nonaka, Fumiyoshi Shoji · 2020
Liquid cooling has been rapidly becoming the de facto standard cooling method for high performance/density racks of modern HPC Data Centers. Semiconductor technology development has made it possible to operate processors (CPU, GPU, and Accelerators) at more higher temperature ranges without compromising the reliability and static power consumption, and these contributed in part to increase the attention over the “hot-water cooling” as one of the main approaches for energy efficient system design. The 2011 ASHRAE Class W4 allows water supply temperature up to 45°C, and even higher temperature for the Class W5. A clear understanding of the temperature impact on the processors would be valuable for assisting the HPC operational staffs for their strategic planning and decision makings. In this short paper, we present our experience in using a simple and cost effective bench testing environment for analyzing the operational behavior of the processors in such high temperature conditions. Although it is far from ideal, since we are not using the same building blocks of the current running HPC system, we consider a valuable alternative for observing the operational behavior of the processors in such temperature environment, and may obtain supportive evidence for assisting strategic planning and decision makings.