Enabling Exascale: CoolIT’s Direct Liquid Cooling Technology Supports The World’s Fastest Supercomputer

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) leverages CoolIT direct liquid cooling technology as Frontier achieves a landmark 1.102 exaFLOPS in its fastest High Performance Linpack

Calgary, Canada. June 16, 2022 – Deployed at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Frontier ushered in a new era of supercomputing with an impressive Linpack run that saw the system surpass 1.1 exaFLOPS, making it the first exascale system in the world. This test has resulted in Frontier sitting atop the 59th edition of the Top500, which was unveiled at ISC 2022 in Hamburg, Germany. Notably, Frontier also appeared atop the Green500, which is a testament to the system’s efficiency and sustainability.

A contributing factor in achieving this new performance benchmark is the adoption of CoolIT’s direct liquid cooling technology. CoolIT’s patented SplitFlow™ technology is embedded in the passive coldplate systems and is responsible for cooling the 9,408 nodes within the 74 HPE Cray EX cabinets.

“Liquid cooling is critical to deliver HPE’s Cray EX supercomputers with leading efficiency.  Breaking the exaFLOP performance barrier is a massive achievement, and doing so with performance per watt leadership on the Green500 list is truly remarkable,” said Gerald Kleyn, Vice President, Systems and Platforms, HPC & AI at HPE. “We look forward to continue collaborating with CoolIT to incorporate its industry-leading cooling capabilities to build powerful and efficient HPE Cray EX supercomputers.”

CoolIT is fast becoming a standard for liquid cooling on large, complex systems such as Frontier. CoolIT technology can be found cooling four of the top ten largest supercomputers and four of the top five greenest supercomputers in the world. The company has a long history of developing leading edge solutions for the world’s largest server OEMs and seems poised to continue this tradition.

“It was a great honor to have our team work on this project,” expressed Steve Walton, CEO of CoolIT. “We are grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute to the significant milestone achieved by ORNL and HPE and we are looking forward to being part of additional projects of this magnitude well into the future.”

To learn more about Frontier, visit the ORNL website at: https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/