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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*
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
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.
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, 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.
Actually, vegatable oils (natural ester fluids) have been used as an alternative dielectric fluid for several years now. A fair number of distribution-size transformers are filled with it, as it has less environmental consequence in the event of spills. It does have lower oxidation stability than mineral oil, so the system would have to be sealed.
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
I know it was a joke, but I fear that, by replacing air by oil, the weight of a server rack might be a problem if it is not located in the basement.
Anyhow, even by reducing the power requirements by using efficient passive cooling to evacuate heat from the chips to the room, you still need to evacuate heat from the room.
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.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/11/bofh_and_t he_vax_cluster/
Oily racks you say? You know this just might catch on.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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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.
"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
Looks like they had no clue then. Building size doesn't produce heat, building contents do. People are 300W each, and you can probably assume computers to be ~200-300W each, too.
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/
Simple. Have the outgoing cables come out of the top and connect to a patch bay, so the little oil that capillary action's itself through the cable will gravity itself right back down the outside.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
...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.
The oil soaked server runs "Mazola" Firefox with the "Grease" Monkey plugin on "Sunflower" Solaris.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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
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
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.
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....
Fluorinert does not deplete ozone! See 3m's website or Wikipedia.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
Yell at me if you like, but I live in a small apartment, use compact florescent bulbs where practical, and don't have a car. And yet I still use more resources than a starving peasant, so I guess we all "could do better". You can buy into this "offsets" garbage if you like, but it is just as much B.S. as the conservatives disregarding everything the man has to say just because he happens to be a hypocrite. He may not be adding CO2, but he is certainly using up resources at a prodigious rate. He plays up this offsets crap because he's financially vested in it.
:)
All of that said, I didn't criticize his energy use, but his INCREASE year-over-year. Even if it was because of the weather or some other reason, the man should have moved out of his mansion and shut it down for 3 months or so just to avoid giving opponents such an easy way to make him look like a hypocrite.
If it will make you lay off of me, I'll stop cleaning my bathtub and let the mold grow - that should offset some carbon
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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. . . .