Phil Hughes, Clustered Systems, presentation of his liquid cooling system for HPC server racks.

1. May 2013
© 2013 Clustered Systems Company, Inc
Life and Times
Phil Hughes
CEO, Clustered Systems Company, Inc.
phil@clusteredsystems.com
415 613 9264

2. Early Days
October 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 2
The perfect job…..
@ 4 years old
Teen Machines

3. Past Projects
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Blue Streak Nuclear Sub Flight Simulator
Concorde Sim
Tornado Autopilot
CNC Lathe

4. Jointing the Dark Side:
Semiconductor Marketing & how I escaped
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Then….
Futurebus
(IEEE 896)
Quickring
SC/MP Acorn ROMs
ASICS for PC &
many others

5. Eureka Moment
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Make Quickring multi-
dimensional and do it properly
Raise money, assemble team
….. and $110M later….
…the BOSS 1000 2.5 Tb/s SONET/SDH switch
with multi-fault tolerant switching network

6. Slough of Despond & Exit Strategy
 BOSS 1000 a brilliant
technical success but
customers were penniless
(e.g. Worldcom)
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 Find alternative applications for technology
 Video Servers
 Fibre Channel switches
 Ethernet/IP switch routers
 Raised funding but no market traction (too early)

7. Introducing..
Clustered Systems Company
 Founded to target the HPC market
 Designed system & proposed to LLNL but…
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How will you
cool it?
 Developed cooling
concept then..
Do cooling or switching,
you can’t do both
Mark Seager
Carl Amdahl We chose cooling (cheaper)

8. Results
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 Prototype system with 2
phase contact cooling
technology
 Licensed technology to Liebert, Inc. for
XDS which “wins” Chill-Off II
 Built 100kW rack installed
at SLAC
 $3M DoE grant
 Intel 130W CPUs

9. Efficient Liquid Cooling offers:
HPC
 Very high power density which
eases communication
 0.3 PFLOP/ rack now (100kW)
 Design is complete
 0.75 PFLOP (200kW) feasible
 With today’s GPUs
Data Center
 Very high power density which
allows DCs to be much smaller
 FB Prineville 75 W/sq ft
 CSys rack 4,000 W/sq ft
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 PUE 1.07 (mech & elec) measured at SLAC
 No air movement so systems can be placed virtually anywhere
 Systems are totally silent (no more OSHA issues)
“Game Changer”
Jack Pouchet, VP
Exascale, Emerson
“Exascale enabler”
John Gustafson

10. Will liquid cooling displace air?
Air
 Air control experts will
fight change as their
skills’ value declines
 90% of DC HVAC
hardware is for air only
 Big is beautiful and
shows solidity (think of
banks)
Liquid
 Green field costs are 1/3
to ½ that of air
 TCO reduced up to 50%
 Existing space can be
used, eliminates long
term $ investment risk
 Faster depreciation = tax
advantages
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Change will happen but it will have to be
driven from top down

11. Futures
 HPC and DC infrastructures will converge
 PUE < 1.0 as technology for energy recovery
from low grade heat matures
 Tree networks will be replaced by meshes
 Multi path, multi-fault tolerant, deadlock, livelock
free, autonomous congestion avoidance, minimal
failure domains
 Cross sectional b/w may vary with application
 SDN granularity will be 1:1
 Fail in place will be commonplace
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