Parts/Cooling/Air cooling (CRAC/CRAH)
Cooling · Air · 1990
Air cooling (CRAC/CRAH)
Room-level air handling. Runs out of headroom well below current rack densities.
Why this part
How every machine was cooled until roughly 2010, and how none of the largest are cooled now. Air has a low heat capacity and the fans that move enough of it consume a real share of the facility's power, so the method runs out somewhere near 20 kW per rack. A single GB200 NVL72 rack draws roughly 120 kW. The transition away from air is not a preference or an efficiency initiative; it is arithmetic, and it is why this dataset tracks cooling architecture as a component with a supplier rather than as a footnote.
Systems using this part
- Systems
- 14
- Rmax underneath
- 198.8 PFlop/s
- Units recorded
- -
| System | Role | Country | Units | System Rmax | Supplied by | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta GenAI cluster (RoCE) 2024-03 | Cooling | USA | - | - | Meta Platforms | - |
| Meta GenAI cluster (InfiniBand) 2024-03 | Cooling | USA | - | - | Meta Platforms | - |
| Eos 2023-11 | Cooling | USA | - | 121.4 PFlop/s | NVIDIA | #23 → |
| Selene 2020-06 | Cooling | USA | - | 63.46 PFlop/s | NVIDIA | #36 → |
| MareNostrum 4 2017-06 | Cooling | Spain | - | 6.47 PFlop/s | Lenovo | #13 → |
| Pleiades 2008-11 | Cooling | USA | - | 5.95 PFlop/s | SGI now Hewlett Packard Enterprise | #3 → |
| Roadrunner 2008-06 | Cooling | USA | - | 1.03 PFlop/s | IBM | #1 → |
| BlueGene/L 2004-11 | Cooling | USA | - | 478.20 TFlop/s | IBM | #1 → |
| ASCI Q 2002-11 | Cooling | USA | - | 13.88 TFlop/s | Compaq now Hewlett Packard Enterprise | #2 → |
| Earth Simulator 2002-03 | Cooling | Japan | - | 35.86 TFlop/s | NEC | #1 → |
| Earth Simulator 2002-03 | Cooling | Japan | - | 35.86 TFlop/s | NEC | #1 → |
| ASCI Red 1997-06 | Cooling | USA | - | 1.07 TFlop/s | Intel | #1 → |
| CP-PACS 1996-10 | Cooling | Japan | - | 368.2 GFlop/s | Hitachi | #1 → |
| CM-5/1024 1993-06 | Cooling | USA | - | 59.7 GFlop/s | Thinking Machines | #1 → |
| Intel Paragon XP/S 140 1993 | Cooling | USA | - | 143.4 GFlop/s | Intel | #1 → |
“Units recorded” sums only the edges where a public source states a quantity. It is a floor, not a total, and should never be read as installed base.