Thermal and mechanical analysis and design of the IBM Power 775 water cooled supercomputing central electronics complex

Back in 2008 IBM reintroduced water cooling technology into its high performance computing platform, the Power 575 Supercomputing node/system. Water cooled cold plates were used to cool the processor modules which represented about half of the total system (rack) heat load. An air-to-liquid heat exchanger was also mounted in the rear door of the rack to remove a significant fraction of the other half of the rack heat load; the heat load to air. Water cooling enabled a compute node with 34% greater performance (Flops), resulted in a processor temperature 20–30 °C lower than that typically provided with air cooling, and reduced the power consumed in the data center to transfer the IT heat to the outside ambient by as much as 45%.