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Oil Soaked Servers Coming Soon
grease_boy writes "A UK company will start selling server racks submerged in oil baths within a year. Very-PC is working on prototypes and says that because oil transfers heat more efficiently, power usage can be cut by fifty percent."
Bring a whole new meaning to Oil in a rack...... geddit..
*grabs coat*
I find most fried foods taste the same. Will computers follow this trend?
That sounds like a step forward. At least, until you consider that anyone working on them would get coated in oil... and frankly, server admins coated in oil are really something nobody wants to see.
Get your liquid cooled super computers here .
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is fantastic! I can't see a single downside to increasing the demand for machine oil in this modern world, nosirree..
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I can see how people would want to do this when hacking their own motherboard, but I would not like to see this become commonplace. For a starter, what to do with the oil after it has been used. I presume that you cannot reuse the oil to bake fries in. And I would really like to know if this would have negative implications considering the life-time of the equipment as well.
No more long cafeteria lines! Simply bring your lunch to the server room and cook away! Make sure you strain the bits out or they'll clog the tape backup. Nobody wants to restore your lunch, anyways.
One of the 187.
So will Al Gore come out with a corn-oil version?
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
HWSpirit did a proof of concept here. I wonder if these guys were inspired by that.
But it's a decent idea. Oil has a high thermal capacity and will circulate through convection keeping the temperature down. Repairs and upgrades aren't going to be all that pleasant but some swarfega will get the grease of your hands after changing the motherboard.
I would think oil had some conductivity (?) well anyway ;)
with the prizes on (non-conducting) cooling liquid from 3M
I guess oil would be a good alternative.. And on the environmental
side, you could burn it after you've upgraded.. Delayed combustion
So, now you're going to have to take your computer to the garage to change the oil?
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He took box made of glass and filled it with oil. Then he put motherboard inside that oil box, removing all fans from the board. I was not interested much about it at that time, AFAIK project was built for some kind of science fair. I don't remember exactly where power supply was, inside or outside. Does power supply without fan will work inside oil filled box?
I've seen systems that are submerged in a liquid before for supercomputers. Someone in a post above linked to some cray supercomputers that are like that. I wonder what the future of this technology holds... Scuba diving into a server room to update hardware? ;D
Do you want me to make the joke about "fried chips" or do you want to do it?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I've overheard her discussing the whole home server obsession with her friends, she is fairly tolerant of my hobby and believes it has one major saving grace.
;)
Its clean!
Especially compared to say motorbikes as a hobby, oily bike parts in the sink are not a good way to endear yourself aparantly...
But now servers come in oil? I can see problems starting here!!
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
I hope they do a corn oil version, I do like freshly cooked chips & a battered sausage.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
because oil transfers heat more efficiently, power usage can be cut by fifty percent.
On the other hand, oil usage rises 100%.
I, for one, would definitly start lobbying for more female tech workers here!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm sure the Slashdot editors will check back with the company (Very-PC) next year to see if they brought any oil-cooled servers to market. And report back with the results.
Liquid cooling has been around for a long time and has advantages over air cooling. Energy efficiency is not one of them.
However, the main problem I see is connectors. Existing connectors have been developed to work in air, except for a few exotic types. Watertight connectors are designed to work with wet environment outside and dry electronics inside, not vice versa, but in any case existing technology would require standard connectors to be used entirely submerged in dielectric. Modern connectors have much smaller contact surfaces than they did even ten years ago, and the distance liquid would have to move by capillary action before breaking the contact is quite small. It's hard to see how you could do accelerated life testing for such a system, which means it could be many years before we know whether they are reliable or not.
I recall when doing research involving electronics in Fluorinert we had to make soldered connections in liquid. Contacts that were frequently made and broken could be pressure contacts, but that is quite different from the situation in a server. And if we had known of a cheap substitute for Fluorinert we would have used it. The majority of oils degrade quite interestingly - you wouldn't expect bacteria to live in them but they can and do if the conditions are right.
These guys may have a workable solution to all the problems, but I can't help thinking that technology will make the concept obsolete. How does the performance of an old Fluorinert-cooled Cray stack up against a modern server in flops and GBit/s of IO per watt? (Hint: Don't bet on the Cray.)
Pining for the fjords
Obviously CPU power usage will be unaffected, smitty is probably talking about the cooling requirements.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The only problem is that oil is a good solvent. Of course, computer equipment is obsolete in 3-5yrs, so maybe it's not an issue. However, the article mentions they tried motor oil first, so I wonder how much they actually thought this through. Motor oil, among other things, is much more viscous than traditional dielectric fluids. The fluids used in transformers are more like water in terms of viscosity. Lower viscosity provides better heat transfer. Also, since high dielectric strength is not an issue, I've got to think that there are some less-corrosive alternatives that will do the job without destroying the components. Half-baked at best, I think.
I'm pretty sure Thomas Edison invented this technology for cooling transformers. Its been around for like a hundred years.
I'm no electrical engineer, but don't some oils have a better dielectric coefficient than air?
leak oil. I knew British ingenuity would eventually overcome the basic problem.
You better put these things into the reduced-oxygen-atmosphere rooms that were mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
You won't have to worry about dust!
How the fuck can this be news when all the major mainframe vendors have done stuff like this since the 60s! For all the kid geeks here; you should know your history...
G.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/11/bofh_and_t he_vax_cluster/
Mmm...deep fried server...
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
Oily racks you say? You know this just might catch on.
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XXX#######
This sounds good until the first oil cooled computer gets slashdotted. Then the fire department has to be called. At least the computer admins will be drenched in foam forcing them to shower more out of schedule. :)
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's not enough that we have jobs where we sit down all of the time, now we have a computer that's also a deep-fryer.
Or, if they use motor oil, will Penzoil and other oil companies start running TV ads? "I couldn't play DOOM 6 until I switch to 10W-40 ultra. Now I kick butt"
Maybe the computers can start coming with chrome valve covers.
I have seen pictures of a mini ATX system board suspended in veggy oil and run that way for a couple of years, but the connectors on the back of the board were kept out of the oil so he could mobe things around when he needed. I guess the used veggy oil could be burned in diesel engines, but...
mod me troll...for get me...not coming back
"Hello, I'm reviewing your application and I don't see any IT exposure in it at all, no education, no experience... what makes you think that you're suited for a job at a server farm?"
"Well, I was a fry cook at McDonalds for 2 years"
"You're hired"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
has been done before. I don't know if I'd ever want to deal with one.
I'll bring the rubber sheet.
Friends don't let friends line-dance.
And when something goes wrong and you need to change out a part? With an air cooled server I can swap a card out without having to wait 4 hours for the air to cool to a temperature which won't instantly scar me for life....
Probably leakproof cabling can be devised, but I doubt it will be cheap.
BTW, I don't know much about connectors, and what I do know is surely a decade out of date. But my impression is that "gas tight" connection technologies replaced simple metal to metal contact technologies in most connectors in the late 1980s due to the high price of gold. Gold is pretty much the ideal metal to metal material as it is soft and doesn't oxidize. But it got expensive and was largely phased out. I have no idea if oil can work its way into a typical "gas tight" connection. My guess would be that it can't/won't, but that's just a guess
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I always thought there were some server administrators better suited to a vocation that required them to say, "You want fries with that?"
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Google puts in a bid to buy McDonalds...
these oil baths will feel so good.
Didn't IBM use oil-cooling on one of their mini/mainframe computer systems back in the day? I seem to recall hearing stories of low oil indicators on the machines. Unfortunately my Google searches on the subject are coming up dry...
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
The opportunities are endless....
... but the idea has been eloquently covered before
with the Beowoulf Vax Cluster.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/11/bofh_and_t he_vax_cluster/
I better edit my spam filter, some of those messages might actually relate to a technical subject.
Can't find the source, but it goes something like "Wannabes worry about clock-speed. Real computer companies worry about cooling."
We used to have about 90% load on a 100KVA transformer. The run-time on the UPS was only about 20 minutes, but that wouldn't matter because within 30 minutes the servers would all have burnt out anyway. (Fortunately, that site has since upgraded to diesel generator which also supplies the aircon.)
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Why does it have to be the entire rack? Wouldn't it be easier to just use oil in a liquid radiator system and deliver the fluid to the hot spots? Sure would make it simpler to get to the computers when something fails.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Thank the maker! This oil bath is going to feel so good. I've got such a bad case of dust contamination, I can barely move!
...covered in oil. Some server admins are cute 25 year old women who work out every day!
The captcha word for me this time is "fondling". How strangely appropriate.
How this will reduce power usage? The same amount of heat is going to be generated by the computer equipment, it's going to get transferred out by the oil much better than traditional air cooling, but then the oil will still be transferring the heat to the server room. It's not like the oil is making energy disappear, it's just holding on to more of it and moving it away from the computer faster. The heat will still eventually be moved to the air in the server room, which will still need to be cooled to avoid overheating.
AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH!
You just HAD to paint that picture, didn't you?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The oil soaked server runs "Mazola" Firefox with the "Grease" Monkey plugin on "Sunflower" Solaris.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
But the other 99.99995% aren't. Those aren't good odds.
no, not wondering if a hot swap involves one of those deep fryer baskets.
But with comments about doing hardware swaps and waiting for oil drainage, can't these problems be solved with keeping some components in boxes/trays, and cirulating the oil in and out of each compartment via something similar to the dry break connectors used in some motorsport hoses.
That way you just yank it out and the only bit of oil to worry about is the amount immediately around the swapped part - which you could leave to drain, rather than having the admin looking like he's just been oil wrestling.
Or is this just a carrot to get IT depts to step up efforts to lure more women into IT?
You have the right idea, but it doesn't work quite that way.
To run a chiller plant / cooling tower capable of dumping heat at a rate of 10 kW does not itself require a power input of 10 kW.
They had nice shiny mainframe racks submerged in fancy coolant in the new sunshine movie. Just make sure IT doesn't make it too easy for a villain to walk by and raise the racks out- which ironically then frys them.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Can we make the moon a giant server farm?
Or just put them in orbit?
Ok, how about Antarctica?
Fluorinert's ozone depleting.
Novec's a greenhouse gas problem.
Every other fluid in this class has the same set of issues, unfortunately.
They may be "clean" and non-toxic, but they're decidedly NOT environment friendly compared to oils-
and they're a hell of a lot more expensive than oils and not as effective at cooling things.
The reason why the fluids are used in the supercomputer industry is more the mess caused by the oils
on everything- and they're actively cooling the systems. Oils are actually superior to the fluids
in heat-transfer terms- it's why you have oil filled transformers for power distribution instead of
dielectric fluid filled ones. The specific heat of Novec is actually less than air's- the only advantages
these fluids have is that you can effectively move a LOT more of it quickly over a surfaces being cooled
without noise and you can refrigerate the stuff to below ambient to temperatures close to the freezing
point of water without condensation risks.
Oils tend to have issues with active cooling. Unless you're implementing vapor-phase, stirling cycle,
or aggressive peltier active cooling below ambient, you are actually better off with oils than the fluids
as they won't work as well at cooling- you'll be better off with air cooling.
This has been discovered by the overclock crowd and they have done a handful of oil-immersed PC's.
The main reason why you don't see a lot more of those oil immersed PC's is oil wicking
by the wires. Each point where a connector would be or a peripheral like a CD/DVD or hard disk is
hooked in has wires coming out of the system that will wick the oil or dielectric fluid out all over
the place. In order to deal with this specific problem, you'd have to resort to specialized sealed
header and other connectors for each edge case for SATA/PATA, VGA/DVI, etc. Those don't come cheap,
so the overclocker crowd tends to just resort to fishtank and similar plays for lan parties or
PAX/QuakeCon, etc.
So, in the end, it is a mixed bag. The oils are messier, but are actually more environmentally friendly
than the dielectric fluids- and they have a higher heat capacity and thermal conductivity in many cases.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Just what we need - something else British that leaks oil. Like the MG's weren't enough. ;-)
--- sig moved for great justice.
All black in your face with oil, it's not just for mechanics anymore!
Coming soon to a computer geek near you.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
slosh
fizz!
Aah... not only have we saved ALL of our VAX power bill, but we've eliminated all noise in the process.
Now to persuade the Boss to dive in to look for the drain plug...
You'd not be any more likely to get laid in that situation than the normal one.
(I will admit, though, that the scenery would probably be more appealing then... >:-) )
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
obligitory
Can someone explain why cooking oil was preferred over mineral oil? I remember an older attempt at oil-submerged PCs where mineral oil was used because the cleanup was easier than other oils. Is it that cooking oil is a cheaper alternative or something? Just curious.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
First you get the heat, then you get the breaking of the box seal so the oil vapourises - and at that point it can ignite. Enjoy
Insert
Fluorinert not impressed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert
let's call it the i-rack
Yeah, I know, that's cold.
:-)
Getoverit!
When I was in the Air Force I worked on radio transmitters that were cooled with silicone oil -- what a mess. Silicone oil as a coolant is NASTY, it leaks and doesn't clean up very easily with detergent. The solvents that we used to clean up silicone oil have been banned (first trichloroethane and then Freon 11).
I remember a guy called Dr. Ffreeze who submerged a motherboard in oil to push the limits of overclocking even further. So this isn't a new idea. His website describing his project is http://drffreeze.net/. The site doesn't look like it's been updated in a while, but it still contains info about what he did.
Would you like fries with your chips?
that was a teletype machine. completely mechanical.
the usual fix or PM for it is to dunk the whole machine in oil to clean it.
I'm serious.
but no, you didn't RUN it in oil. you just 'fixed' it with oil.
model 33 ref
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Ooh, this oil bath is going to feel sooo good!
The ones at substations use Oil and some times they go up in flames.
just Google substation fire
This gives another meaning to "my computer just fried".
On the other hand they should open a French(aise) Fries with MC Donalds, just add potatoes.
"They will have to run the HDDs outside the oil because they do, in fact, need ventilation."
;)
What?? No they don't.
When the harddrive is submerged in oil, the oil cools the hdd with the natural thermal convection or with the help of a pump to circulate the oil.
Just like any other electrical component.
"However, the main problem I see is connectors. Existing connectors have been developed to work in air, except for a few exotic types. Watertight connectors are designed to work with wet environment outside and dry electronics inside, not vice versa, but in any case existing technology would require standard connectors to be used entirely submerged in dielectric. Modern connectors have much smaller contact surfaces than they did even ten years ago, and the distance liquid would have to move by capillary action before breaking the contact is quite small."
Que?
Flourinert is a dielectric, so is the oil they're using (it's not as good as flourinert I'm sure). If the connectors are connected before submerging, and probably even after, the connection will still be enough to work.
Flourinert isn't really a very deep penetrating substance, so getting between two connecting surfaces (insulate) is quite small. And veggy oils are even worse
So do you have to take these servers in for oil changes every 3000 miles.
The smell of slashdotted server will never be the same!
I thought companies were making giant improvements with some sort of alcohol/water mixture and running that over the processors themselves. This coiled oil soaking around the entire server seems a bit ridiculous. As previously stated, what happens when someone has to work on them? You need to pull them out and wipe them clean, and get going. This also must open the door to at least some potential for disaster if one of the cases isn't properly sealed and the whole thing floods with oil... no?
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
What did they do? Dump the machines into Prince William Sound?
What?
It just had to be a British company! (If you don't understand, search this page for the word "British".)
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Sure...I bet most people hiding behind Slashdot anonymity are cute 25 year old women.
I of course believe anything on the internet and bring it up later in conversation...
Somebody : All computer geeks are ugly males.
Me : Not true, there are some hot 25 year old server admins all over the place. I saw one post anonymously without posting a picture the other day.
Seriously, either post a picture of a hot girl wearing a real nerdy admin t-shirt doing some admin stuff or shut the hell up. I'll spare the whole "living in the parent's basement" rant here....
I guess it's got to be extremely heavy if they actually plan on filling the whole rack with oil. Either you'd have to build the floors very, very sturdy or stick with a single-story data center.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
The only problem i can see is that once you bath your pc components in oil you cannot reuse them elsewhere because the contacts get all dirty.
... just dry it off, and it's clean. Really great for taking cutting oil off of parts after machining.
Well, yeah, but that's what methyl ethyl ketone is for!
Slightly offtopic: I had always assumed that MEK was increasingly hard to get because they had discovered it caused cancer or something, but Wikipedia indicates that it's actually a drug precursor? Bizarre. Anyway, you used to be able to get the stuff in most hardware stores, and it's just about the best degreaser that you'll ever use. You can put a greasy part in MEK, swish it around a little, and pull it out
Not sure when exactly it happened, but all of a sudden it became really hard to just go out and buy anymore. Seems to me it was about 10 years ago. But if Wikipedia is to be believed, it still gets used as a solvent in a lot of paints and stuff.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
the fortune up right now is "I am covered with pure vegetable oil and I am writing a best seller!"
The waste heat form oil cooled servers will be used to cook sweet delicious French fries and funnel cakes. Yes friends the server room now has a drive up window. Thanks for choosing Server King.
That's one way of doing it. However, I suspect that the cheapest way is probably to just keep the oil constrained to the racks, and use chilled water throughout the building. There's a lot of existing experience and infrastructure related to chilled water.
Depending on the temperature you need to get it down to, it might be acceptable to just use passive cooling (cooling/evaporative towers, radiators) and not actual refrigerative (state-change, with compressors and the rest) systems. Certainly if you built your datacenter in a northern climate, you'd probably be fine most of the year by just pumping the water/coolant through some radiators on the roof and back down.
And you could do the same thermosiphoning stuff with water as you can with oil, but with a lot less oil. Sure, you have an extra heat-exchange step, but you don't have to worry about using oil-proof fittings throughout the building -- regular plumbing would suffice.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Now hot-swapping components will involve breathing gear.
The servers will still be producing most of the heat, this would *hypothetically* just increase the rate of heat transfer to the outside of the machine.
Without removing the heat from the room, you're still going to end up with environmental heat buildup.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
apparently some of them are also desperate attention whores
It was not just conversation. It was the fact that you could do offsets. Apparently, he spends a fair amount of money on doing trees and other offsets so that he is carbon neutral. IOW, he is not adding CO2 to the planet while you ARE.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
done by the more radical fringe of the PC overclocking world for a couple of years now.
Just google for it, there's plenty of references.
One thing I don't understand though... why doesn't the oil get between any of the push-fit connectors like power connectors and PCI slots etc and cause bad connections? I thought oil was both an insulator and very prone to spreading through osmosis, like spraying WD40 on a jammed nut or something, it works its way in to the thread.
Check your MSDS. Both products have an ozone depeletion potential of zero - there's no chlorine in them. Fluorinert's 100-year global warming potential is very high - over 5000. Novec, on the other hand (assuming you mean HFE-7100), has a 100-year GWP of 320, which is about the same level as nitrous oxide. It's not the best, but then again it's also in the company's best interest to make sure none of it gets into the atmosphere - it's expensive as hell, so letting it evaporate is like watching money blow away. With this taken into account, I'd probably say that Novec 7100 is the "greener" choice.
Fluorinert does not deplete ozone! See 3m's website or Wikipedia.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This guy doesn't know WTF he's talking about, refined oils CAN be used as a dielectic, there a MANY organic oil based dielectric fluids.
I'd heard of this oil being used in SuperComputers many years ago.
They have to use a special "non conductive" oil -- I believe it doesn't damage electronics and plastics.
So other than a few fans and viscosity issues -- it should be pretty easy to implement. Should be better than "water" cooling, because you can have oil over most everything.
It's just they are taking a supercomputer trick and moving it to a server/blade farm. I don't know about the cost of this oil -- but I would suspect they would quickly save the money in electriciy costs -- and air conditioning bills, because you could pump the oil outside the building and do your heat exchange there.
I was suprised they didn't use this instead of the water cooling when it first emerged -- because there is less of an issue if you spring a leak (should also be easier to keep oil from leaking than water).
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Half the power is consumed by cooling? Not likely. Given the current air conditioning technology, the coefficient of performance (Joules of heat moved by 1 Joule of air conditioning energy) is about 2.5 to 1. Assuming their system requires zero energy (It doesn't. They propose using a refrigeration unit to create convection currents) the best savings they could hope for is 28%. In reality, the heat needing to be moved will not go down. The energy savings will be produced by moving the same quantity of heat with a smaller volume of working fluid (oil instead of air). Some savings will also be realized by not having to condition the entire data center building to suit the equipment requirements.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes, that was my first thought on reading the headline. We're so fixed on eliminating the use of oil that sometimes it's all we can think about...
But, biodiesel would be A) home grown, B) non-toxic, C) nice-smelling, and D) reusable in to make DIESELPOWAH.
-- haaz.
OK, so first of all, how do you get systems, cables, etc in and out once it's soaked. Also, what kind of floor reinforcing are we talking about after we fill a rack with a hundred or more gallons of oil. And what if I have to move it!?!?
:)
Why don't we just put in centralized water cooling attachments in the rack risers so we can add and remove cooling blocks? sounds like a better idea to me. It would not be hard at all to do. In fact, I'm about to do some patent research and file one on this idea if I can
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
It just had to be a British company! (If you don't understand, search this page for the word "British".)
I hear tell the scots will attempt to fry anything!
Imagine a beowulf cluster at the bottom of a McDonald's French Frier.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Would you like fries with that?
The fluid was Fluorinert and it was pretty expensive when I admin'ed the Cray II at NASA Langley back in 1988.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This article seems to be incomplete. The comments noted in the closing of the article are presented and left hanging, despite being very important to the topic.
'I don't know why oil is being suggested for computer cooling instead of accepted dielectric fluids," says Garimella, who is not familiar with Very-PCs plans. "The idea itself seems the same as using dielectric fluids and the latter are clean, non-toxic and ozone-friendly.
Tom Halfhill, an expert with electronics industry publication Microprocessor Report, says the solution is far from ideal. "There are a number of exotic ways to cool electronics, all the way up to vats of liquid helium," he told New Scientist "However, a better solution is to avoid generating all that heat in the first place. Heat is wasted power. Heat is inefficiency. Reducing the power consumption of processors and other components is more desirable than exotic cooling."'
RTFM; please, I beg you.
The Scottish are British.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
I spend three years working on a server solution that used various oil's, solvents and water in tubes to cool servers, we also had a silient computer http://www.silentcomputing.com/ http://www.silentcomputing.com/i.html
There is also some Super high thermal conductive Materials we called Bridges in there. All stock Motherboards and cards.
If you get any ideas from the Photo's please remember to credit me.
In 2001 to 2004 No investors would touch anything with fluids in the server room. Also the Corperate IT guys were also rejecting it outright.
Ducted Air was getting more promise.
At this time there is no reason to Wet all of the electronic with Oil, talk about a messy unmanagable solution. I friend of my actually built one, but you still have problems with the hard drives and you still need to circultate the oil just as with fans. Also beyond a certain point, you would still need to have heat exchangers (radiators) to cool the oil with outside air, and possible a compressor based chiller too.
At Nisvara, we had developed and prototyped systems with Fluid cooling, phase change fluid cooling, ducted air and chilled water as well as a total silent desk top system that didn't require any moving fans cooling components and just based on thermal conduction using High termal conductivity materials.
We had figured out how to build a fluid cool server room that wouldn't need any air conditioning even in 130F outside air tempteratures.
Again using all off the shelf computer components and could be 100% sure of no fluid leakage into the system. So everything stayed cool, quiet and easy to service, even easier then the conventional designs used now.
Almost had a contract with NASA Ames ARC center to build a 1000 server clusted that use the technology.
Anyhow the company is mostly dead at this time, I'd be happy to collaborate with anybody interested in still persuing this technology.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
True. However, it's expensive as fsck, and that alone is probably a good enough reason not to use it.
An excerpt from a demo by the Munich-based THG lab: "Not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil - but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components."
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
...an oil-cooled PC in a fishtank : the calypshuile page
Yeah it was; I saw mine at Sandia Base Albuquerque.... ;)
The joke back then ( about the round Cray design and the fact that they kept getting smaller) was "we designed a Cray 5, but someone dunked it in their coffee
The Architecture for those beasts was WAY ahead of its time. One thing I always found interesting; the Macintosh was designed on a Cray (YMP I think) that about a year ago was sold on eBay, now, I can run a Cray YMP emulator on my Mac. The Circle of Life as it were...
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Oil-submerged systems have been used since the eighties. What's next? "Breaking news: company announces dedicated graphics processor with 3D acceleration"...?
> Bear in mind that a lot of the 300W
> of your power supplies in each system
> is dissipated as heat.
A lot? Well, unless you count the noise and air movement (which are eventually also turned into heat, though not in the actual box), it's pretty much all of it, no? It's not like it's being stored in some sort of chemical compound or potential energy "reservoir".
Apple used a Cray to help design models of the Macintosh.
Cray used Macintosh computers to help design the (next) Cray.
Well... We did manage to crash our Cray II by taking a flash photograph.
Apparently, the system had a fluid sensor to shutdown the box if the Fluorinert level dropped. The sensor worked by tracking the light level -- fluid dropped, more light received -- you see where I'm going with this. They repositioned the sensor so it wasn't pointing at the plexiglass facing the observation window.
Ahh, those were the days.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If each Schwin was outfit with an upgraded Wireless Access Point/embedded computer supported by a mechanical-Generator on the bicycle transmission complemented by a Uninteruptable Power Supply Unit to a small Solar Array for redundancy, then we can load-balance the politic to relay the route and distribution of Data just when the CIA screens all the web with the intentional drop of Internet1 by their DRM-contained Internet2.
without prejudice
This was discussed on the overclockers.com (look into oilcolled PSU - neat)
I looked into exactly this problem for using oil to assemble silent systems here in California.
Take a look into Envirotemp FR3 transformer fluid from Cooper Power
Systems.
It is organics based and is free of most of restrictions on use.
It is sold in 4 gallon drums for about $9 per gallon - exactly the size you need for an average fish-tank fitting an ATX-sized mobo.
Try Cooper's west coast service facility, Western Utilities Transformer Service for pricing.
This "new technology" is not so much new. Oil has been used for decades to cool high voltage substations. It is only now able to be applied to new technology such as racks etc.
The interesting thing is not that oil is being used to dissipate heat, but how they managed to get the racks made in such a way that they will still function whilst surrounded by oil.
that's me RETIREMENT grrrrease!
Wow. This has to be the most factually interesting response to a joke I've ever seen. Thanks!
Nothing new. Both HardOCP and Bit-Tech did experiments on submersion oil cooling years ago.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you