Supermicro's Innovative Cooling Tech Enhances AI Centres
Supermicro is reshaping the landscape of AI data centres with its latest technological advancements, which aim to support the escalating need for improved and scalable AI infrastructure efficiently.
Recognised as a pioneering entity in optimised IT solutions since its inception in 1993, Supermicro has consistently been at the heart of technological innovation across sectors such as cloud computing, AI and edge infrastructure.The company’s cutting-edge solutions facilitate the next wave of digital transformation, offering advanced systems catering to diverse data centre needs — encompassing high-performance processors, GPUs and efficient power, coupled with state-of-the-art cooling solutions like liquid cooling.
Revolutionising cooling with DLC-2
The latest Direct Liquid Cooling solution (DLC-2) by Supermicro is engineered to handle up to 98% of heat emitted by GPUs.
This advancement not only leads to quieter operation by reducing noise levels by up to 50 decibels but is also a preemptive adaptation to the demand for liquid-cooled data centres, which is forecasted to leap from below 1% to approximately 30% of the market soon.
- Up to 40% power savings in the data centre
- Liquid cooling provides faster time-to-deployment and reduced time-to-online
- Up to 40% reduced water consumption with warm water cooling now available
- Quiet data centre operation enabled at 50dB
Designed to confront modern data centre challenges such as energy consumption, water usage and space limitations, DLC-2 enables a reduction in power consumption by up to 40% when compared with standard air-cooled setups.
Additionally, the warm water cooling capability at temperatures of up to 45°C curtails water consumption by a similar margin.
“With the expected demand for liquid-cooled data centres rising to 30% of all installations, we realised that current technologies were insufficient to cool these new AI-optimised systems,” says Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro.
“Supermicro continues to remain committed to innovation, green computing and improving the future of AI, by significantly reducing data centre power and water consumption, noise and space. Our latest liquid-cooling innovation, DLC-2, saves data centre electricity costs by up to 40%.”
The inclusion of cold plates for essential components like CPUs and GPUs minimises reliance on high-speed fans and rear-door heat exchangers, thus diminishing cooling costs and adapting to higher supply coolant temperatures.
The utilisation of a GPU-optimised server housing eight Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and two Intel Xeon 6 CPUs within a 4U rack is a testament to this capability.
Streamlined scaling with DCBBS
Complementing its cooling innovations, Supermicro introduces its Data Centre Building Block Solutions (DCBBS) aimed at expediting the installation of liquid-cooled AI centres.
This approach extends the ’building block’ concept from system-level to entire data centres, offering standardised yet customisable structures for managing complex AI tasks.
- Easy to design, build, deploy and operate for all critical computing and cooling infrastructure
- Quick time-to-deployment and quick time-to-online with everything required to fully outfit AI/IT data centres
- Saving cost with modularised building block solution architecture
- High quality and high availability
This comprehensive solution aims to address the full spectrum of infrastructure requirements for AI deployments.
Supermicro claims this comprehensive approach enables faster implementation and reduced costs.
“Supermicro's DCBBS enables clients to easily construct data centre infrastructure with the fastest time-to-market and time-to-online advantage, deploying as quickly as three months,” says Charles. “With our total solution coverage, including designing data centre layouts and network topologies, power and battery backup-units, DCBBS simplifies and accelerates AI data centre buildouts leading to reduced costs and improved quality.”
With tailor-made configuration options, Supermicro's offerings allow enterprises to adapt these technologies to their specific requirements, addressing the complexities of growing AI demands while enhancing sustainability.
Solutions like this are designed to support data centres amid high AI demand, particularly as they have to confront sustainability challenges.
By offering flexible technology that can be embedded into an existing facility, organisations can scale their data centre operations without having to build out lots of new infrastructure.
Charles adds: “Along with our DLC-2 technology, DCBBS also helps customers save up to 40% power, reducing 60% data centre footprint and decreasing 40% water consumption, all of which leads to 20% lower TCO.”
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