Submer Immersion Cooling at SC19

At Supercomputing 2019, Submer showed off its immersion cooling. The Barcelona based company is designing cooling solutions not just for today’s dense compute, but also looking forward to the next few years when CPUs will hit 350-400W and GPUs/ accelerators will achieve 700W or more. The company not only showed off its own solutions, but it had partners showing solutions on the floor as well.

Submer Immersion Cooling at SC19

Submer has two primary models of the SmartPodXL. Shown on the floor is a 23U/ 21OU unit that is designed for dissipating up to 50kW. There is a Submer SmartPod XL+ that will dissipate up to 100kW.

The tanks themselves are powered by an OCP-style bus bar. You can see the power supply shelf in the center of the tank here.

The Submer SmartPodXL family can handle OCP or 19″ rackmount equipment. It sounds like the company sees OCP as the major path forward. We have already discussed how the new OCP Open Accelerator Modules (OAMs) are designed for 700W+ each.

Submer says that its fluid is a food-rated solution that is not toxic to humans. The solution is designed to be used for over a decade before requiring service.

2CRSI Immersion Cooling at SC19

Beyond the submer booth, 2CRSI also had its solution powered by Submer on the show floor.

That includes nodes specifically designed to be housed in the immersion cooling tanks.

As a nice touch, there are small “rubber duckies” in the “pond” of immersion cooling tank fluid.

Final Words

Immersion cooling was a big topic at SC19. We previously covered other solutions in Sugon Nebula Phase Change Immersion Cooling, Wiwynn Two-Phase Immersion Cooling System, Alibaba Immersion Cooling, and in our Inspur Partner Forum 2019 Our Recap from IPF 2019. As TDPs are going to double (or more) from 2018 to 2022, maintaining density while increasing power consumption will also require liquid and/or immersion cooling. Submer is ahead of a market that is rapidly catching up.