A water-cooling solution for PC-racks of the LHC experiments

With ever increasing power consumption and heat dissipation of todays CPUs, cooling of rack-mounted PCs is an issue for the future online farms of the LHC experiments. In order to investigate the viability of a water-cooling solution, a prototype PC-farm rack has been equipped with a commercially available retrofitted heat exchanger. The project has been carried out as a collaboration of the four LHC experiments and the PH-ESS group . This note reports on the results of a series of cooling and power measurements of the prototype rack with configurations of 30 to 48 PCs. The cooling performance of the rack-cooler is found to be adequate; it extracts the heat dissipated by the CPUs efficiently into the cooling water. Hence, the closed PC rack transfers almost no heat into the room. The measurements and the failure tests show that the rack-cooler concept is a viable solution for the future PC farms of the LHC experiments.