At the recent 2014 International Supercomputing Conference Student Cluster Competition Boston Limited proudly sponsored and teamed up with the University of Edinburgh. This was the second ISC competition for team Edinburgh and with the help of Boston Limited they upped the hardware ante significantly.
With team Edinburgh and Boston Limited working together we wereable to produce one of the most advanced clusters seen to date in the competition. This involved a liquid-cooled rig, with water blocks on the CPUs and GPUs, plus a very large radiator on top. When configured for air cooling, each of the high performance nodes contained 10 or 12 fans.
By using a liquid cooled variant we were able to remove the majority of them, leaving just three low power fans per node to cool the un-water-blocked memory and motherboards. Alongside this we were able to take away a large number of the cooling fans pushing air through the radiator. Our four-node configuration, with the eight GPU’s running at full speed did not generate enough heat to require the full cooling capacity of our rig.
Please see below a link to a video which takes a look at the system:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/01/bagpipers_and_brazilians_build_your_own_joke/