The project is carried out by the physics department of the University of Regensburg in collaboration with the IBM Research and Development Laboratory Böblingen and InvenSor.
The iDataCool high-performance compute cluster is a research project on cooling with hot water and energy reuse in data centers.
[2] The iDataCool research project was presented at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany, in 2013,[1] which led to it being featured in several articles.
[7] If the design of the liquid-cooling system allows for high coolant temperatures, energy can be saved or even reused, depending on the climate conditions and on the local infrastructure.
The former option is implemented, e.g., by the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum in Germany, where SuperMUC drives the heating of the data center during winter with roughly 1 MW recovered from the compute equipment.
The latter option, which is the design target of iDataCool, requires a high quality of the heat, which can only be achieved by direct hot-water cooling.
The aim of iDataCool was to achieve coolant temperatures of more than 65°C, at which commercially available adsorption chillers tend to become efficient, and to demonstrate the long-term stability of a large production machine under these conditions.
A compute node consists of two Intel Xeon Westmere server processors and is arranged as a distributed shared memory system with 24 GB of DDR3-SDRAM.
A copper pipeline provides the water flow and is also thermally coupled to passive heat sinks for other components such as memory, chipset, and voltage converters.