HPE shows fanless direct liquid cooling systems architecture

HP Enterprise has developed a 100% fanless direct liquid cooling systems architecture for large-scale AI deployments.

While efficiency has improved in next-generation accelerators, power consumption is continuing to intensify with AI adoption, outstripping traditional cooling techniques.

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Organizations running large AI workloads will need to do so more efficiently. The most effective way to cool next-generation AI systems is through direct liquid cooling. This critical cooling technology has enabled HPE’s systems to deliver 7 of the top 10 supercomputers on the Green500 list, which ranks the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers.

“The architecture uses only liquid cooling, delivering greater energy and cost-efficiency advantages than the alternative solutions on the market. In fact, this direct liquid cooling architecture has the potential to yield a 90% reduction in cooling power consumption as compared to traditional air-cooled systems,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE.

“HPE’s expertise deploying the world’s largest liquid-cooled IT environments and our market leadership spanning several decades put us in an excellent position to continue to capture AI demand.”

The system architecture uses an 8-element cooling design that includes liquid cooling for the GPU, CPU, full server blade, local storage, network fabric, rack/cabinet, pod/cluster and coolant distribution unit (CDU).  An integrated network fabric design for massive scale integrating lower-cost and lower-power connections

The fanless direct liquid cooling architecture provides a 37% reduction in cooling power required per server blade, when compared to hybrid direct liquid cooling alone. This reduces utility costs, carbon production and data centre fan noise. Because systems using this architecture can support greater server cabinet density, they consume less floor space.