Cooling 11.6 TFlops (1500 watts) in an office environment

Abstract

This work presents a practical, low-pressure pumped-two-phase cooling system that can be implemented in a high performance workstation form factor employing Novec 7000, a dielectric fluid from 3M. By taking advantage of the vapor to liquid phase change, a total of 1500 W of heat could be removed from the 10 processors (2 CPUs and 8 GPU processors) to ambient with a total temperature difference of 37 °C or less between the ambient and the processor or processor package. The high thermal performance allowed the Nvidia Tesla K80 processors to operate in “boost” mode 100% of the time, increasing their performance by 55%.