Ancient Perth aquifer makes space-age computer one of world’s greenest

“The Pawsey Centre employs a cooling mechanism which leverages a shallow aquifer beneath the centre to shed the accumulated heat created by Setonix,” Stickells said.

“This removes the need to use cooling towers as the primary cooling mechanism and thus loses no water to evaporation while having sufficient solar generation to run the required pumps.

“This means the cooling systems for Setonix have essentially nil impact on the environment.”

The centre’s cooling distribution unit removes heat from the system via a heat exchanger with data centre water, with liquid cooling routed to individual blades and components in cabinets as part of a closed-loop system.

“The CDU requires an inlet water temperature of up to 32 degrees, which helps eliminate the need for chillers in many environments and further lowers energy usage,” Stickells said.

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“Given the efficiencies of liquid cooling as compared to air, the budget for power and cooling for a liquid-cooled supercomputer can be significantly less than a similar sized air-cooled installation.”

Setonix’s green credentials earned it fourth spot at the top of the Green500 list of supercomputers, unveiled at the SC22 conference in Texas on Tuesday.

It sits among supercomputers in France, the United States and Sweden, and can rightfully claim the crown of the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, with a consumption of 56.9 gigaflops/watts.

Along with boosted green credentials, Setonix also ranks at 15 in the Top500 list of supercomputers.

Both rankings were made based on the peak and maximum power of Setonix’s GPU partitions.

Stickells said Setonix’s GPU portion was about 80 per cent more efficient than its CPU portion, making the whole infrastructure significantly more energy-efficient than the supercomputer’s predecessor, Magnus.

“One of the things that we’re doing in the new Setonix system is actively evaluating the energy efficiency of algorithms running on the system, reporting to researchers what their energy usage is for the computational tasks that they complete,” he said.

“The energy efficiency of the hybrid system will give researchers the incentive they need to get algorithms working on the GPU infrastructure.

“So when researchers are contemplating where to invest their effort in how to use a system, they’ll be thinking about the advantage they get by running on the GPU system, and then leveraging that increased efficiency in their work.”

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“The Pawsey Centre employs a cooling mechanism which leverages a shallow aquifer beneath the centre to shed the accumulated heat created by Setonix,” Stickells said.

“This removes the need to use cooling towers as the primary cooling mechanism and thus loses no water to evaporation while having sufficient solar generation to run the required pumps.

“This means the cooling systems for Setonix have essentially nil impact on the environment.”

The centre’s cooling distribution unit removes heat from the system via a heat exchanger with data centre water, with liquid cooling routed to individual blades and components in cabinets as part of a closed-loop system.

“The CDU requires an inlet water temperature of up to 32 degrees, which helps eliminate the need for chillers in many environments and further lowers energy usage,” Stickells said.

Loading

“Given the efficiencies of liquid cooling as compared to air, the budget for power and cooling for a liquid-cooled supercomputer can be significantly less than a similar sized air-cooled installation.”

Setonix’s green credentials earned it fourth spot at the top of the Green500 list of supercomputers, unveiled at the SC22 conference in Texas on Tuesday.

It sits among supercomputers in France, the United States and Sweden, and can rightfully claim the crown of the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, with a consumption of 56.9 gigaflops/watts.

Along with boosted green credentials, Setonix also ranks at 15 in the Top500 list of supercomputers.

Both rankings were made based on the peak and maximum power of Setonix’s GPU partitions.

Stickells said Setonix’s GPU portion was about 80 per cent more efficient than its CPU portion, making the whole infrastructure significantly more energy-efficient than the supercomputer’s predecessor, Magnus.

“One of the things that we’re doing in the new Setonix system is actively evaluating the energy efficiency of algorithms running on the system, reporting to researchers what their energy usage is for the computational tasks that they complete,” he said.

“The energy efficiency of the hybrid system will give researchers the incentive they need to get algorithms working on the GPU infrastructure.

“So when researchers are contemplating where to invest their effort in how to use a system, they’ll be thinking about the advantage they get by running on the GPU system, and then leveraging that increased efficiency in their work.”

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.