French-based geophysical services company CGGVeritas has deployed servers immersed with a liquid cooling solution for its high performance computing (HPC) environment in Houston, Texas.

The servers, developed by Super Micro Computer with Green Revolution Cooling, sit in 24 submersion racks as part of a 600kW Carnotjet System, which allows them to be cooled at 40C, almost eliminating all air conditioning costs.

Each rack contains 40 Supermicro GPU SuperServers with 41K GPU cores.

According to Green Revolution Cooling, this is just the start of the project. It said the installation - which has so far brought about a reduction in cooling costs of 40% - is ongoing.

The Carnotjet System uses a non-conductive GreenDEF direct coolant which Green Revolution Cooling said is optimized for cooling servers and other data center hardware.

Super Micro Computer general manager of HPC Dr Tau Leng said by using the innovative liquid submersion technique developed by Green Revolution Cooling, Supermicro has been able to push the limits of its servers and reduce the amount of power required in the HPC environment.

The vendors said that that overall, the solution can reduce energy consumption by 95% - removing the need for air conditioning – and provide 1,200 times more heat retention than air. Repurposed heat can also be captured by the Carnotjet submersion rack system.

“In conjunction with GRC’s submersion technology we are able to push operational limits of our GPU-based SuperServers even further while effectively reducing the overall energy requirements,” Leng said.

“This joint solution delivers CGGVeritas supercomputing performance with enhanced PUE (the solution is so far showing a PUE of 1.12) for its unique data acquisition and analysis applications.”

In 2010, Green Revolution Cooling secured its first data center customer Midas Networks, which bought four Carnotjet 42U racks. This installation has since been used as a showcase for the technology.

CGGVeritas has established a name for its innovative approaches to geophysical surveying. CGG was founded in 1931 by Conrad Schlumberger, an inventor in the area of geophysics and well logging and joined Veritas to form CGGVeritas in 2007.

Today it works largely with oil, gas and shipping companies around the world providing seismic technologies and carrying out research and development.

The next edition of DatacenterDynamics FOCUS will include a special insert on data center cooling. Sign up in advance for your copy here.