HPC Infrastructure

From working with different datacenters, NEC have extensive experience to provide the best infrastructure solutions for the HPC environment. With the power consumption going up in newer generations of systems and the need for environmentally friendly cooling rising, customers notice that infrastructure is playing a larger role.

Indirect Cooling with Water Cooled Racks

With regards to the tradeoff between investing in infrastructure and investing in servers, the side-cooler solution is a highly interesting concept. Here, the airflow circulates from the hot server rear side through high performance side cooling elements back to the server front. By restricting the air volume to the rack a more effective cooling can be realized than by conventional air conditioning. Inlet water temperature of up to 28 degrees Celsius can be used.

This method is compatible with all standard servers and can even be combined with free-air cooling methods, which exploit low outside temperatures to cool the servers in an environmentally friendly way. With the help of additional cooling equipment one can also cover the peaks in summer. Many datacenters successfully use this model.

Direct Liquid Cooling

More and more datacenters put a lot of efforts into reducing their cooling costs even further by making the leap to direct hot-water cooling. In this concept the water has an inlet temperature of up to 45 degrees Celsius and directly cools CPU, memory and other equipment by elements that are part of a closed water circuit. NEC works together with several vendors in the field to enable the best solution for each datacenter.