NVIDIA GPU-based FAN controller for SUPERMICRO server

This controller enables automatic adjustments of FANs in SUPERMICRO servers based on GPU temperature. Only NVIDIA GPUs are supported since the tool uses nvidia-smi to parse the GPU temperature. FANs are controlled through IPMI tool (impitool) using the modified superfans (https://github.com/putnam/superfans) script.

Requirements

• Linux (tested on Ubuntu 18.04)
• Python 3 / pip3
• nvidia drivers/tools (nvidia-smi)
• IPMI tool (ipmitool) with loaded module (modprobe ipmi_devintf)

Tested on SUPERMICRO 4029GP TRT2 with RTX 2080 Ti (nvidia 415.27 drivers).

NOTE: Using this script on other systems requires manual calibration of a function that converts the FANs RPM values into %-based values (function SUPERMICRO_4029GP_TRT2_RPM_to_percent() in supermicro.py). Current values are hardcoded for SUPERMICRO 4029GP TRT2.

Install

sudo apt-get install ipmitool && modprobe ipmi_devintf
sudo make install

By default python packages are installed using pip3 and superfans-gpu-controller.service is created (started and enabled at boot).

Usage

Service is registered to start at system startup. Start and stop it using:

# start
sudo systemctl start superfans-gpu-controller

# stop
sudo systemctl stop superfans-gpu-controller

# check the status
sudo systemctl status superfans-gpu-controller

# view logs (with trailing)
sudo journalctl -f -u superfans-gpu-controller

Manuall usage

Directly call python script (requires sudo access for impitool):

sudo python superfans_gpu_controller.py config.json

Print RPMs of all FANs grouped by zones:

sudo python superfans.py

Settings

Settings are in /etc/superfans-gpu-controller.json for systemd and by default the config contains:

{
    "fan_settings" : {"0": 20,
                    "60": 25,
                    "70": 30,
                    "80": 35,
                    "87": 40,
                    "90": 43}
}

This corresponds to following mapping of GPU temperature in °C to the percent of activated FAN (relative to max RPM as manually set for SUPERMICRO 4029GP TRT2):

• 0°C => 20%
• 60°C => 25%
• 70°C => 30%
• 80°C => 35%
• 87°C => 40%
• 90°C => 43%

At full workload using 4x RTX 2080 Ti this results in around 75°C - 80°C at GPU.

TODO:

• split settings into seperate config file
• enable linear increases between each setting point
• enable online calibration of FANs (currenlty hardcoded for SUPERMICRO 4029GP TRT2!!)
• enable robust detection of faulty FANs as outliers (using RANSAC-like algorithm)