National Center for Computational Sciences

Cray, known for its power and packaging prowess since 1976, when Seymour Cray bent the Cray-1 into a “C” shape, is unveiling a petascale-era cooling technology it says is more than 10 times as efficient as same-size water coils. Cray CTO Steve Scott discusses this innovation and the company that was green before green was cool.

HPCwire: What is Cray’s new cooling technology?

Scott: We call it ECOphlex technology. The “phlex” part refers to multiple things. First, the cabinet infrastructure can use either Cray’s high-efficiency vertical air cooling or our new phase change cooling technology that converts an inert refrigerant, R134a, from a liquid to a gas. The other flexibility is that the liquid-cooled systems can use various chilled or unchilled datacenter water temperatures to pull heat from the R134a subsystem and to adapt to changing datacenter conditions. The phase change coil is more than 10 times as efficient at removing heat from the compute cabinets as a water coil of similar size, so the in-cabinet cooling system is much smaller and lighter than it would be with water coils. Water is only used in external heat-exchange units.

The ECOphlex technology is the first of the Cray “Baker” technologies we’re introducing. We’ll start using it when we ship the Cray XT5 petascale system to Oak Ridge later this year. After that, all Cray XT5 systems will ship with ECOphlex capability in the new high-efficiency cabinet.

Continue reading the rest of the interview at HPCwire.com.