ACADEMIA

Appro has introduced the new Appro Xtreme-Cool Supercomputer, the next generation liquid-cooling architecture. Appro plans to showcase its next generation system at SC12 in Salt Lake City, Utah - November 12-15. Formal presentations and a live technology demonstration will be available at the Appro booth #2443. The system will have limited production availability starting in early Q1 2013.

The Appro Xtreme-Cool offers all the best features and benefits of the current Appro Xtreme-X air-cooled solution with superior energy savings, lower TCO and faster ROI by requiring fewer or no air conditioning units in the datacenter. Its superior energy-efficiency design uses warm water liquid -cooling heat exchangers with no chillers reducing typical energy consumption used to cool the data center by 50% while dropping PUE lower than 1.1. It also produces 80% heat capture to the warm water for possible heat reuse.

The system is composed of blade nodes that are typically installed in a cluster architecture rack and the liquid cooling installed in the node is connected to the Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU) via tubes with drip free quick connects. The liquid cooling is specifically designed to be interconnected in the node, directly cooling processors and memory in an isolated low pressure secondary loop to more efficiently remove heat compared to air-cooling. Appro’s unique system design enables leak detection and prevention for an extra measure of protection. Integrated remote power and temperature monitoring and reporting is also provided. In addition, all processors, GPUs, coprocessors and memory are Field Replaceble Units (FRUs) similar to our air cooling solutions offering serviceability, reliability and flexibility.

The Appro Xtreme-Cool Supercomputer can be configured as Fat Tree or 3D Torus architecture with interconnect options for single or dual rail, InfiniBand or Ethernet making it optimized for superior application performance. The system is composed of two processors per node supporting approximately 80 nodes per rack in a standard 42U rack based on Intel Xeon processor E5 Family. It also supports hybrid processing based on Intel Xeon processors paired with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. It uses quieter low-power fan system operation for a better work environment and an option for a 480 volt power distribution with a choice of 208 or 277 volt power supplies for further energy savings. The system features the Appro’s HPC Software Stack including Appro’s Cluster Engine, built-in-multi-generation management suite with monitoring and reporting capabilities. In addition, Appro offers end-to-end supercomputer solutions from design, integration, and delivery to on-site installation and customized services.

“Appro's new Xtreme-Cool Supercomputer is aimed squarely at the worldwide high performance computing market, which reached a record $10.3 billion in 2011 and is predicted by IDC to exceed $14 billion by 2016. Appro's new product is designed to address key customer requirements such as less or no air-conditioning in the datacenter with warm liquid-cooling heat exchanger technology, which enables direct cooling of the compute processor and memory combined with power and temperature monitoring software. This has the potential to improve price/performance and TCO for dense, large-scale cluster environments,” said Earl Joseph, IDC HPC Program Vice President.

The Appro Xtreme-Cool is designed to address medium-to-large datacenters HPC deployments up to 25 PFLOPS of computing performance. It is an ideal solution for end users who require best price/performance, scalability, reliability, manageability, and a liquid-cooling energy efficient architecture that reduces datacenter power and cooling operational costs for a lower TCO. It offers a scalable solution for a wide range of HPC applications addressing four critical HPC workload configurations: capacity, capability, data intensive and hybrid computing.

"The new Appro Xtreme-Cool supercomputer offers a liquid-cooled solution with no need for air- conditioning in the data center enabling customers to scale up their performance, while reducing datacenter operation costs,“ said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro. “The Appro Xtreme-Cool offers high performance and energy-efficient industry standard architecture providing price/performance cooling capability for today’s data center requirements while building the path to Exascale level supercomputers.”

“Customers who are pressing the state of the art in scientific discovery are looking for not only outstanding performance and energy-efficiency, but also programmability and manageability”, said Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, VP Intel Architecture Group and GM Technical Computing, Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. “The Appro Xtreme-Cool meets those needs by combining the power of Intel Xeon processor E5 family with the programmability and energy efficiency of the Intel Many Integrated (Intel MIC) architecture based Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. This combination of technologies establishes a new standard for both programmer productivity and performance per watt.”