Supercooling comes to the forefront
More than ever, the design of supercomputers turns on devising a way to cool the superfast machines. It's still important to select a high-density high-speed IC package, design a controlled-impedance, state-of-the-art, multilayer printed-circuit board, and figure out how to interconnect all circuitry with a minimum of propagation delay, reflections, and crosscoupling. But tomorrow's systems could dissipate as much as 100 kW, and so cooling is even more critical than in today's supercomputer designs. Not suprisingly, the leading supercomputer maker, Cray, is also a leading innovator in supercomputer packaging. The company's first units, the Cray-1 and X-MP, are based on relatively simple ECL small-scale-integration chips in ceramic flatpacks mounted on 6-by-8-in., five-layer pc boards. Vertical Freon-cooled aluminum columns carry away the heat generated by horizontal stacks of pc boards. For Cray's next system, the Cray-2, the company went to a completely new design for packaging and cooling. Instead of a horizontal stack of boards, Cray used an even denser three-dimensional cube of slightly smaller circuit boards, which raised the power-dissipation level above that of the Cray-1. To take care of this power increase, Cray decided to immerse all boards in Fluorinert, an inert cooling fluid from 3M Co. This fluid is kept circulating across the boards, keeping critical components at a uniform and safe temperature.
- OSTI ID:
- 5841310
- Journal Information:
- Electronics; (United States), Vol. 59:10
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
SUPERCOMPUTERS
COOLING SYSTEMS
DESIGN
CIRCUIT THEORY
COOLING
CRAY COMPUTERS
FREONS
INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
POWER RANGE 100-1000 KW
PRINTED CIRCUITS
COMPUTERS
DIGITAL COMPUTERS
ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS
ENERGY SYSTEMS
HALOGENATED ALIPHATIC HYDROCARBONS
MICROELECTRONIC CIRCUITS
ORGANIC COMPOUNDS
ORGANIC HALOGEN COMPOUNDS
990200* - Mathematics & Computers