The Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC), created to satisfy the demand for High Performance Computing (HPC) of a consortium of five Austrian universities, released a competitive tender to build the most powerful supercomputer in Austria. However, this was not your regular competitive bid process where systems that meet the minimum requirement compete purely on the bid price. The VSC took a long-term perspective towards cost and performance, they defined very specific targets and tests that reflected the long-term cost of the system. GRC came together with ClusterVision, Intel, and Supermicro to create a custom solution that came out well on top of the competition.

This paper will explore how GRC’s technology helped dramatically reduce the upfront cost and energy consumption of the system. Thereby allowing reallocation of capital towards more computing power

Modern supercomputer performance is principally limited by power. TSUBAME-KFC is a state-ofthe-art prototype for next-generation TSUBAME3.0 supercomputer and towards future exascale. In collaboration with Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) and others, TSUBAME-KFC submerges compute nodes configured with extremely high processor/component density, into non-toxic, low viscosity coolant with high 260 Celsius flash point, and cooled using ambient / evaporative cooling tower. This minimizes cooling power while all semiconductor components kept at low temperature to lower leakage current. Numerous off-line in addition to on-line power and temperature sensors are facilitated throughout and constantly monitored to immediately observe the effect of voltage/frequency control. As a result,TSUBAME-KFC achieved world No. 1 on the Green500 in Nov. 2013 and Jun. 2014, by over 20% c.f. the nearest competitors.