The Vrije Universiteit Brussel has officially put the new Flemish Tier-1 supercomputer Sofia into operation. For the first time in history, the VUB will manage the Flemish supercomputer, located at the Nexus Data Center in Zellik, for the next 6 years. The investment of 8.6 million euros should help Flanders further in AI and HPC research. The Flemish government is investing €8.6 million in Sofia, which was developed by NEC. The system was selected primarily for its energy efficiency.
Liquid cooling tech is hot. It's only Tuesday and already infrastructure specialists have forked out more than $10 billion on companies proffering tech that promises to help ease energy bills of datacenter operators. Power management biz Eaton has signed an agreement to acquire the Boyd Thermal business of Boyd Corporation from Goldman Sachs Asset Management for $9.5 billion, while digital infrastructure firm Vertiv is set to absorb PurgeRite Intermediate LLC, a company specializing in optimizing cooling systems, for approximately $1 billion in cash.
The star of the show was the industry's first mass-produced liquid cooling system combined with advanced air-cooling innovations. You can learn more about it on the company's official site. This is liquid cooling similar to what you see in powerful gaming PCs and AI servers - a pump circulates liquid over hotspots in the machine and then towards a fan and radiator that expel the heat. Just to be clear - we've seen vapor chambers sometimes be referred to as "liquid cooling". While they do have liquid in them, they are passive cooling devices. This is an active cooling system that can handle a lot more heat.
Businesses seeking a powerful rack-optimised server will find HPE's ProLiant Compute DL360 Gen12 could be just what they're looking for. Supporting up to 144-core Xeon 6 CPUs, this dual-socket 1U server targets a diverse range of high-performance workloads such as server consolidation, hybrid cloud, databases, VDI, data analytics, and virtualization. The Gen12 portfolio comprises eight servers and introduces a wealth of new features, including enhanced platform security.
