HPC in the Cloud: Texas HPC Center Finds Cool Relief in Oil-Submerged Servers

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January 18, 2012

Texas HPC Center Finds Cool Relief in Oil-Submerged Servers

Jan. 18 -- Christiaan Best was sitting in a field when the initial idea for his company took root. A friend was telling Best about the cooling systems being installed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), where he worked, and the plans were so inefficient, so counterintuitive, that it started Best on a search for alternatives.

Some months later, enjoying a meal with one of his friends at Magnolia Café in Austin, Texas, he had a eureka moment and sketched an idea for a new data center cooling system on the back of a napkin. The idea involved building a rack that could hold densely packed computer servers in a circulating bath of liquid mineral oil.

Best and co-founder Mark Tlapak built a prototype in Best's mother's garage and brought investors by as his mother served coffee and tea. The company's breakthrough moment came at the Supercomputing 2009 conference where Green Revolution Cooling's fluid submersion cooling system for HPC was named one of the year's Disruptive Technologies. It won the distinction again in 2010. Around that time, Best and Tlapak met with staff at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to talk about the advantages of GRC's fluid submersion system.

For the rest of the story, along with video and graphics, go to http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/green-revolution-cooling.

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Source: Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)

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