Water cooling in a super computer called Trinity

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

Somebody call Mario

I’m sure your gaming PC is astonishingly powerful and some of you probably have some pretty incredible custom built water cooling solutions, but they don’t stand a chance next to the water cooling system currently being installed at the Los Alamos’ Strategic Computing Center for the new Trinity supercomputer. Previous supercomputers at the SCC have been air-cooled, so this upgrade to the massive building needs to be in place before Trinity can start to be installed. Just be thankful you don’t have to upgrade your house when you get a new PC.
 

In this case however the cost is a little more than what you might have paid for your gaming PC, with U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration paying $174 million, to US supercomputer hardware company Cray, to make a multi petaflop supercomputer system. According to the NNSA the supercomputer will be used to simulate “the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without the use of underground testing,” and when you put it like that, the $174 million bill suddenly doesn’t look so bad.
 

The actual Trinity supercomputer, a next generation Cray XC machine, will be placed on top of all of those pipes and running through the pipes will be water from Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Sanitary Effluent Reclamation Facility (SERF) that has been cooled by a cooling plant. No fancy lights on this machine though, so your gaming rig wins that round, for now. Inside the machine itself is going to be a combination of an unknown number of future-generation Haswells (probably 14-18 cores) and future Knights Landing processors (probably 72 cores per chip and 3 teraflops of peak performance!), complemented by an 82 petabyte capacity Cray Sonexion, distributed storage system with a throughput of 1.7Tbps (terabytes per second).
 

“If this system were delivered today, it would be the fastest in the world” according to Barry Bolding, vice president of storage marketing at Cray. But there is at least a year before the supercomputer is delivered and installed, so by then there may be new competitors for the top spot in the world-wide supercomputer ranking, the so-called top500.
 

The internals however, should give it the power it needs to compete with, if not overtake, the world’s fastest supercomputer, since June 2013, the Chinese Tianhe-2 at China’s National University of Defense Technology. This system currently delivers around 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) and is mainly made up of Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and Xeon Phi chips, with a total of 3,120,000 cores. The current number two is only a measly 17.59 petaflops.


Ever wanted to be a computer plumber?

Source : http://www.kitguru.net/channel/science/brendan-morgan/water-cooling-in-a-super-computer-called-trinity/

[Altecice]

hehe that's cool. But its used all the time in datacenters on even larger scale.

[JeffreyEagan]

I would die. The amount of water flow through that system. GO WITH CLEAR TUBING AND SOME DYE.

[shermantanker]

it still can't play assassins creed unity.

[euniqe]

ugh..

 

Love the technology, hate the purpose. Nuclear detterrent? really? Only america....

 

 

Meanwhile Titan (amongst others) is being used to simulate a combustion chamber amongst other ACTUALLY USEFUL things that may indeed improve our lives. 

 

How will this improve my life?

[Takata]

hehe that's cool. But its used all the time in datacenters on even larger scale.

I thought datacentre watercooling was uncommon since a leak could destroy some very expensive hardware and result in some very expensive downtime. Plus, if Linus's whole room watercooling project is anything to go by, it's probably much easier to just air-cool datacentres with the help of huge air conditioners.

 

"Nuclear deterrent"? I don't really understand what that is or why you need a supercomputer for it.

 

EDIT: Datacentre cooling terminology doesn't seem that consistent, so it's possible that "watercooling" a datacentre doesn't actually mean pumping water through blocks which are directly attached to the heat generating components.

[Beskamir]

Looks like @LinusTech got some competition with the whole room liquid cooling project he had going.

 

But seriously this is pretty cool.

[ManWithBeard1990]

I reckon you don't really need a supercomputer for that. But whatevs.

[Syntaxvgm]

Servers are watercooled all of the time. it's a normal thing. I mean this is different, but still logical. 

[brownninja97]

why arent we investing in ocean cooling.

[cesrai]

why arent we investing in ocean cooling.

Sydney opera house is, see Richard Hammond episode about it, the episode was on Nat Geo and it was brilliant engineering I think.

[Altecice]

I thought datacentre watercooling was uncommon since a leak could destroy some very expensive hardware and result in some very expensive downtime. Plus, if Linus's whole room watercooling project is anything to go by, it's probably much easier to just air-cool datacentres with the help of huge air conditioners.

 

 

Yup its very common, I don't mean pumping liquid through blocks its more used as a massive heat exchanger for the hot air (A/C Unit). The fans cools the servers and the water takes the heat away. Data centers rely on this method so much that if the pumps that run the liquid fail, the servers would overheat and die before anyone could issue a command to shut them down. Thats why most Data centers have more than one source of power (2 power suppliers, diesel generators) as well as probably N+1 redundancy Meaning everything has a replacement ready to failover if one fails.

[Victorious Secret]

I reckon you don't really need a supercomputer for that. But whatevs.

 

You actually do. A lot of the supercomputing power on the EARTH is used for defence purposes, for a good reason. 

[patrickjp93]

I thought datacentre watercooling was uncommon since a leak could destroy some very expensive hardware and result in some very expensive downtime. Plus, if Linus's whole room watercooling project is anything to go by, it's probably much easier to just air-cool datacentres with the help of huge air conditioners.

"Nuclear deterrent"? I don't really understand what that is or why you need a supercomputer for it.

EDIT: Datacentre cooling terminology doesn't seem that consistent, so it's possible that "watercooling" a datacentre doesn't actually mean pumping water through blocks which are directly attached to the heat generating components.

Google data centers literally come in shipping containers with the fluid paths integrated. The water runs directly over the heatsink blocks of the components.

[AxelRantila]

Mandatory "But can it run Crysis"

Servers are watercooled all of the time. it's a normal thing. I mean this is different, but still logical. 

Yes they are. I'm fairly sure I saw some video from one of Google's  datacenters where they used watercooling

[Syntaxvgm]

Mandatory "But can it run Crysis"

Yes they are. I'm fairly sure I saw some video from one of Google's  datacenters where they used watercooling

I do too. I don't know what they use, and intel actually submerges some of theirs if I remember right, but most use something like the Asetek system for those wondering. 

[jos]

city Cray Sonexion, distributed storage system with a throughput of 1.7Tbps (terabytes per second).

Source : http://www.kitguru.net/channel/science/brendan-morgan/water-cooling-in-a-super-computer-called-trinity/

Tbps is tera bits per second not bytes

[Opcode]

Anybody? 

 

[ManWithBeard1990]

You actually do. A lot of the supercomputing power on the EARTH is used for defence purposes, for a good reason. 

 

I'm not convinced it's possible to write an algorithm to determine the effectiveness of a deterrent (inherently a psychological thing, I think we can agree) that's so accurate that it would warrant the use of such an expensive piece of equipment.

 

It doesn't take a supercomputer or even a particularly intelligent human to determine that yes, a nuclear arsenal has been and for some time will continue to be a very effective deterrent.

[Victorious Secret]

I'm not convinced it's possible to write an algorithm to determine the effectiveness of a deterrent (inherently a psychological thing, I think we can agree) that's so accurate that it would warrant the use of such an expensive piece of equipment.

 

It doesn't take a supercomputer or even a particularly intelligent human to determine that yes, a nuclear arsenal has been and for some time will continue to be a very effective deterrent.

 

Its not just that. Logistics, planning, counter attack and counter counter attack scenarios; these supercomputers run EVERYTHING. The effects on Wall Street. The Treasury. The fallout. How long it would take for the EARTH to recover, much less the US. What areas would be hit, what areas it makes sense to hit. 

These supercomputers literally spend their time thinking of every possible doomsday scenario and then filing them from "yea right" to "100% likely" 

[ManWithBeard1990]

Its not just that. Logistics, planning, counter attack and counter counter attack scenarios; these supercomputers run EVERYTHING. The effects on Wall Street. The Treasury. The fallout. How long it would take for the EARTH to recover, much less the US. What areas would be hit, what areas it makes sense to hit. 

These supercomputers literally spend their time thinking of every possible doomsday scenario and then filing them from "yea right" to "100% likely" 

Ah, now I see what you're getting at. Thanks, mate.

 

Still, it kind of annoys me these awesome things are used as instruments of war. That said, if used in that way they can save lives when the day comes that someone is indeed insane enough to start a nuclear war. But then again that's what the idea of M.A.D. is supposed to prevent/deter. I do understand that in the end it's only a matter of time until someone decides to break the relative peace (yes there is fighting going on in some parts of the world but it could be a lot worse), and when they do we'll be ready for it, but part of me still feels that there must be more immediately useful things these computers (or that money) can be used for.

[ErickS89]

Looks like @LinusTech got some competition with the whole room liquid cooling project he had going.

 

But seriously this is pretty cool.

This pretty much destroys anything Linus was doing and on a much larger scale.

[McMurderMonkey]

Test run for next-gen AMD FX cooling?

 

/s

[ZuluSamus]

But can it run Minecraft?

[Guest]

But can it run Minecraft?

Yep at 20 fps on low graphics... No TNT or it will Lagg!