In mid-November, Lee Piazza and I had the opportunity to attend an international high-performance computing (HPC) conference called SC19 (SuperComputing19), in Denver, Colorado. In this blog, I’d like to share a few observations from our trip.
My initial reaction when I walked onto the exhibit floor was one of pure shock and amazement at the enormous size of the event. All of the global IT manufacturers were present, and some had invested quite heavily to make their presence felt. Nvidia, Intel, HPE, Dell, and a few others occupied what felt like acres of floorspace. One could spend hours just making a single pass over the exhibit floor. Clearly, the event’s tag line “HPC is now” has never been more true.
As a first-time attendee, I was fascinated to see dozens of Universities from every major country around the globe using this event to promote their own research and HPC capabilities. Research dollars are still, as they have been for decades, a key driver of computing technology advancement. I learned that available capacity on a supercomputer is a valuable asset when recruiting the smartest research scientists in the world.
One unexpected revelation was the continuing shift away from purely air cooling, and the near-unanimous commitment to some form of liquid cooling technology for HPC environments. CoolIT, for example, was a newcomer a few short years ago outside of the gamer community. At this event, their direct-to-chip liquid cooling designs were adopted in a multitude of solutions offered by at least a dozen exhibitors.
Several immersion cooling manufacturers used this event as a coming-out party, while a few old timers in the field also made a splash (so to speak). Solutions like those from Submer, which integrate liquid heat rejection within a 100kW+ horizontal IT enclosure, will undoubtedly gain traction as the power densities continue to rise. One IT hardware manufacturer, 2CRSI, has already started developing immersion-optimized servers. As immersion becomes mainstream, we can expect industry leaders like Dell and HPE to develop their own similar products.
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