Design and characterization of a sealed hybrid-cooled high performance computing server

This paper presents a novel 1U sealed design of high performances compute server using of jet impingement liquid cooling to cool the high power density components (CPU and GPUs. The system is studied using CFD simulations of both the liquid coolant loop and the recirculated air used to cool the peripheral components, showing good agreement with the experimental results with 52°C above ambient temperature measured on the CPU for the experimental data, versus 47°C for the simulation, and 22°C versus 16°C for the GPU core. Traditionally cooled HPC servers typically take a 2U or 4U form in order to accommodate the large liquid-air heat exchangers required to expel CPU and GPU heat into the air, however, this paper shows that this can be achieved in the significantly smaller 1 U form factor by using a sealed server architecture.