[Beowulf] 'liquid cooled' racks

[Richard Walsh]

Jim Lux wrote:
> At 04:20 AM 12/6/2006, Daniel Kidger wrote:
>> I am at a UK HPC Conference today (so is Greg L for that matter)
>> One of the speakers said he was evaluating Spraycool to retrofit to his
>> existing cluster.
>>
>> So if these guys spray *downwards* on the chip - what is the risk of 
>> a blocked
>> tube causing the Flurinert to catch fire?
>
> Fluorinert is, as the name implies, inert.  It doesn't burn.  
> Actually, it's pretty amazing stuff.  If you remember the photo from 
> decades ago of the mouse breathing under the surface of a liquid.. 
> that was Flourinert.
Non-combustable, but not exactly inert.   At temperatures greater than 
200 degrees C it begins to decompose yielding
an HF aerosol among other things.  I believe there was an incident with 
the old Cray T90 that required a computer room evacuation, but perhaps 
that was an urban myth.

rbw

-- 

Richard B. Walsh

"The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one
 perceived. The subject and object are but one."

Erwin Schroedinger

Project Manager
Network Computing Services, Inc.
Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC)
rbw at ahpcrc.org  |  612.337.3467

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