Elice Group tests cooling Nvidia B300 servers with hot water and outside air

Seoul Economic Daily reported on 14 November that Elice Group is now pilot-testing a modular GPU data centre in South Korea whose cooling combines hot water with outside air. Elice says, according to the paper, that trial operations began on 30 October at the site, which holds Nvidia B300 GPU servers and is part of a Ministry of Science and ICT programme that supports buying, building and operating advanced GPUs.

In the system, liquid at more than 40 degrees Celsius draws heat away from the GPUs, and outside air then cools that liquid, the paper reported. Elice says the approach lowers the power spent on cooling and aims for a PUE, or power usage effectiveness, of 1.1 or lower, according to the paper. The paper says Elice Group is running the two kinds of cooling side by side for the first time since it moved into data centres; Elice calls the site a world first for B300 servers cooled both ways.

The paper says the ministry's programme is meant to add to South Korea's computing infrastructure for AI and give firmer footing to the use of high-performance GPU resources. Elice Group was picked as an operator for it in June and has since been building the infrastructure to run the B300 GPUs in AI PMDC, the company's own modular data centre design for AI. Elice plans to open the commercial service before the end of the year, once the beta phase is over, according to the paper.

Elice set out the plan earlier, in a release of 4 August in its own newsroom: 2,560 B300 GPUs in four modular buildings of 640 each, with cooling from coolant at 40 degrees Celsius or above, which it called warm-water cooling, plus free air, and a PUE goal of 1.1. That release also said the design would use direct liquid cooling and a patented layout of separate pipes to reduce the risk of leaks.