Submerged Supermicro Servers Accelerated by GPUs

greenrevolution-cggveritas

Supermicro and Green Revolution Cooling have teamed with an energy research company to create a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster featuring servers that are accelerated by GPUs and immersed in a liquid cooling solution.

The 24-rack installation at CGGVeritas in Houston is the largest deployment to date of Green Revolution's CarnotJet cooling racks, which are filled with 250 gallons of dielectric fluid, with servers inserted vertically into slots in the enclosure. Fluid temperature is maintained by a pump with a heat exchanger using a standard water loop.

The CGG Veritas system uses Supermicro servers accelerated by dual graphics processing units (GPUs) and optimized for a submerged environment. The result is a powerful and highly-efficient cluster with densities of 25 kilowatts per rack, which doesn't require room-level cooling and operates at a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.12.

Platform for Oil and Gas Exploration

The new HPC platform allows CGGVeritas to dramatically accelerate its data-intensive seismic survey analysis, which is used by energy companies to evaluate underground areas for oil and gas exploration.

“The CarnotJet system has enabled CGGVeritas to implement a tremendously powerful GPU-accelerated cluster at a very attractive cost," said Christiaan Best, Technical Founder of Green Revolution Cooling (GRC). " We’re pleased that Supermicro has provided submersion-ready servers that perform extremely well in the system. We look forward to the continued expansion of the submersion cooling data center at CGGVeritas."

Supermicro’s 1U dual-GPU SuperServer (SYS-1026GT-TF) was chosen for its high-density computing power and overall capacity to maximize performance and energy-efficiency in the fluid-cooled racks.  Each 42U Green Revolution rack contains 40 Supermicro GPU SuperServers.

"In conjunction with GRC’s submersion technology we are able to push operational limits of our GPU-based SuperServers even further while effectively reducing overall energy requirements," said Dr. Tau Leng, General Manager of HPC at Super Micro Computer. "This joint solution delivers CGGVeritas supercomputing performance with enhanced PUE for their unique data acquisition and analysis applications."

Green Revolution’s first unit was installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, home to the Ranger supercomputer. Subsequent installations have been at Austin ISP  Midas Networks, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.