At the ISC, powerful processors and accelerators ensure an oppressive climate. Gigabyte takes care of the cooling. Last year immersion cooling was an exciting novelty, but this year it’s already part of a complete solution.

AI is hot, and the same goes for the servers that allow training of AI models. You can take that literally. “Today, powerful accelerators already have a thermal design power (TDP) of 350 watts to 400 watts,” said Thomas Yen from Giga Computing at the ISC High Performance trade fair in Hamburg.

giga computing

Yen and his team are at ISC to highlight the company’s HPC servers and new name: Giga Computing. Gigabyte will continue to show branding at the top. “Giga Computing is part of Gigabyte,” explains Yen. “The new company gives us the opportunity to better focus on our market while continuing to operate as part of the Gigabyte group.”

Today, Giga Computing is responsible for the design of the latest high-performance HPC servers with the Gigabyte logo. “We work with numerous partners, including Nvidia, AMD and Intel, to bring powerful solutions to the market,” he continues. “We’re trying to be at the forefront of innovation there and have new servers ready before there’s a lot of customer demand.”

“We are at ISC to introduce our latest innovations to customers,” Yen continues. HPC is an increasingly competitive field. While Gigabyte and Giga Computing are no newcomers, it doesn’t hurt to show off the hardware visually. After all, the company has had experience building servers for third parties since the 1990s, but has only entered the market under its own name with high-end hardware for a few years.

Close and warm

To stay at the forefront of innovation, Gigabyte packs many accelerators into one server. This high density has its price: it gets hot. Even without too many accelerators, servers are a hot mess: the CPUs from AMD and certainly Intel are responsible for as much heat development as a modest stove.

For many servers, this means efficient air cooling. Even today, conventional cooling is sufficient to keep the temperature of the hardware within limits. In addition, data centers are designed for air cooling. However, since hotter hardware is on the horizon and energy efficiency is a priority, alternatives are becoming necessary.

submerged

This year, numerous robust air-cooled servers in various configurations will be on display at the Gigabyte booth. However, the focus is on a proprietary solution for immersion cooling. “We know servers are going to get hotter in the future,” Yen says. Gigabyte believes in this technology to keep tomorrow’s servers up to date. “The goal is to use cooling to maximize CPU and GPU performance in the server.”

Immersion cooling is a technique in which servers are immersed in a special liquid. It looks like oil. “But don’t call it oil,” says Carlo Landmeter, field application engineer at Gigabyte. “The liquid does have a slightly higher viscosity and, above all, it is not electrically conductive. Plus, it’s not harmful.” Gigabyte’s single-phase immersion cooling uses a Shell-developed dielectric liquid.

The unit itself is the size of a large freezer with a smaller fridge next to it. The liquid circulates in the tank. Warm liquid passes through a heat exchanger (the mini fridge) where the heat is extracted. This is possible, for example, with water connected to a larger cooling system tailored for a data center. The liquid dissipates heat better than air, keeping the servers fresh in the bin.

Total control

That sounds easier than it is because one server is not the other. For example, fluid flows more freely along a server with fewer components than along a server with multiple accelerators packed together. This certainly plays a role when servers with different specifications share a bin. Gigabyte presents itself at the ISC as a specialist in this field.

Cooling accounts for just two percent of the total energy costs for the servers

There are good reasons for it. After all, as a hardware manufacturer, Gigabyte has control over its own servers and their thermal properties. In addition, the company can appear as a whole One stop shop for powerful servers with immersion cooling. Customers can opt for the total solution with all the associated benefits. Most importantly, the impressive PUE value of 1.02 means that only two percent of the total energy costs for running the servers within the solution are spent on the actual cooling.

Rapid development

With its own immersion cooling solution, Gigabyte shows that it is at the forefront of technological developments. That doesn’t mean that all gigabyte servers will go to waste tomorrow. Although the majority of the manufacturer’s servers rely on classic air cooling, classic liquid cooling via heat exchangers also plays an important role.

Nevertheless, the speed of development at the ISC is amazing. Last year, Gigabyte touted immersion cooling with the help of partners, but today the company has taken over the development. Gigabyte and Giga Computing will thus be at the forefront of the inevitable breakthrough of the technology.

This is an editorial in partnership with Gigabyte / giga computing.