2. Early Days
October 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 2
The perfect job…..
@ 4 years old
Teen Machines
3. Past Projects
October 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 3
Blue Streak Nuclear Sub Flight Simulator
Concorde Sim
Tornado Autopilot
CNC Lathe
4. Jointing the Dark Side:
Semiconductor Marketing & how I escaped
October 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 4
Then….
Futurebus
(IEEE 896)
Quickring
SC/MP Acorn ROMs
ASICS for PC &
many others
5. Eureka Moment
October 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 5
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)
October 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 6
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…
October 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 7
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
October 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 8
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
October 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 9
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
March 17 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 10
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
March 17 2011 Clustered Systems Company, Inc 11
