Cooler Master to Demo 20-Core Machine at CeBIT

Cooler Master seems to be showing keen interest in small-scale cluster computing, or at least the casing, power and cooling part of it. In a bid to flex its engineering muscle, the company that is known best for its coolers and PC cases, is coming up with an intensive cluster-computer dubbed "20 Cores PC". What might look like an overgrown PC case from the outside, with enough room inside to accommodate an enthusiast PC setup, water-cooling, massive storage, and still room left to hide things, actually is a modified ATCS 840 to perpendicularly stack up to five mini-ITX motherboards, in essence, five systems. Armed with decent skills in networking and virtualization, one can build a small cluster-computer out of those five sub-PCs.

The 20 Cores PC Cooler Master plans to demonstrate this CeBIT has five motherboards powered by an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 processor each (hence 20 cores). Each CPU is water-cooled by the cooling system in place. Each motherboard has all essential components connected such as dedicated memory (2 GB per board), and fixed-storage. Each PC additionally has its own optical drive. In the cooling efficiency tests conducted by the company, it was noted that after five hours of full-load, the hottest CPU reached only 66 °C, with an ambient temperature of 30 °C and chipset temperature of 38 °C. The temperatures seem impressive indeed, though credit goes to the three 200 mm ventilator fans, a 120 mm fan, and a water-cooling system consisting of five pumps and a large radiator. The entire unit is powered by a Cooler Master 1,200 W power supply.







Source: http://www.techpowerup.com/86340/Cooler_Master_to_Demo_20-Core_Machine_at_CeBIT.html