At SC22, CoolIT showed off a new CDU, and a surprisingly compact unit at that. The new CoolIT CHx500 is designed to fit a lot of cooling into a “relatively” small space. After the conference, we just wanted to show a few photos of what we saw, this being one of them.
CoolIT CHx500 500kW 10U CDU at SC22
The CDU is called a 10U CDU + 1 RU rack shelf height unit. I asked Patrick what the +1 was, and he said, “I spent 45 minutes taking selfies and talking with folks in CoolIT’s booth alone, so I have no idea.” Amazing reporting. Still, here are the specs:
The new CoolIT CHx500 CDU is designed to cool 500kW in a liquid-to-liquid fashion. This manages the exchange of heat from a rack’s warm water loop to facility liquid or another cooler loop.
CoolIT has 4U CDUs that we have seen, albeit updated now, called the CHx200, which is designed to cool up to 200kW in a 4U chassis. It seems like aside from releasing a bigger CDU, with the same cooling capacity per rack unit as the smaller CHx200, the company is updating the mainstream 200kW design.
Along with the new CDU, the company’s other new product is the Serviceable Pump RPU. This is a redundant pump and reservoir unit. I asked Patrick, and he said, “Reservoirs in these are used to ensure the pumps always have fluid going through them. They are reliable so long as there is liquid, but they would burn out quickly if run dry.”
It seems like that explanation covers why the new unit has both pumps and a reservoir. This design has hot-swappable pumps to allow one pump to fail and still operate. A common question is, “what happens if a liquid cooling pump fails?” This is the answer. Having redundant and hot-swappable pumps like power supplies.
Final Words
If you want to learn more about how liquid cooling works, we did a piece earlier this year at CoolIT with a 2U 4-node Gigabyte server in How Liquid Cooling Servers Works with Gigabyte and CoolIT. We go through the steps of building an entire liquid cooling loop.
We also toured CoolIT’s liquid lab in Calgary on the same trip.
As we saw with the recent AMD EPYC “Genoa” launch, new CPUs are now in the 350-400W TDP range, and we are getting to 800W–1kW accelerators, so liquid cooling is becoming a bigger topic.
Update: We just published our SC22 video that has more views, and some video on this here:
Thank you so much for the story, Cliff! So glad you got to visit our booth. The 1 U rack shelf means that the CDU box itself is 10U, but to install it in a rack, it sits on a shelf that is 1U high. So when in a rack, it will take up 11U of vertical space.
Local community colleges need to a Data Center Plumber track.