Analysis of the efficiency characteristics of the first High-Temperature Direct Liquid Cooled Petascale supercomputer and its cooling infrastructure

SuperMUC, deployed at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, is the first High-Temperature (ASHRAE W4 chiller-less) DirectLiquid Cooled (HT-DLC) Petascale supercomputer installed worldwide. Chiller-less direct liquid cooling can save data centers a substantial amount of energy by reducing data center cooling overheads. An essential question remains unanswered - how to determine an optimal operational environment for balancing scientific discovery with the energy consumption of both the supercomputer and the cooling infrastructure? This paper shows, for the first time, how the new technologies (HT-DLC and chiller-less cooling) influence the performance and energy/power efficiency of large-scale HPC applications and how different inlet temperatures affect the overall system power consumption and the HT-DLC efficiency.